How Many People Can 254 Pounds Of Fentanyl Kill?

Source: Fortune

The largest amount of Fentanyl seized in a drug bust to cross the Mexico border into the United States occurred a little over a week ago as reported on 'Voice Of America' recently:

PHOENIX — 

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials announced Thursday their biggest fentanyl bust ever, saying they captured nearly 254 pounds (114 kilograms) of the synthetic drug that is helping fueling a national epidemic of fatal opioid overdoses from a secret compartment inside a load of Mexican produce heading into Arizona.

And shown (the picture taken from the article) below:

Source: VOA

Readers who are familiar with my writing will remember that I wrote a similar post on this very topic a half a year ago.  In that post, I developed the methodology for determining the amount of Fentanyl needed to kill a person.  The result was a range of 2-3 milligrams needed to kill an adult.  WOW.  The photograph at the beginning of the blog post illustrates the differences of quantities needed between heroine and Fentanyl to kill a person.  As you can see the vial located on the right has barely any powder inside of it.  Hence, the range of 2-3 milligrams is spot on.



Of course, as I also mentioned in the previous blog post, the exact amount needed to kill a person has never been determined.  That amount would be officially reported as the 'LD50' -- the amount needed to kill 50% of the population (testing population) off.

254 Pounds Of Fentanyl = "x" Deaths?

First, the amount of milligrams contained in a single pound are needed.  Why?  The Fentanyl was reported in units of measurement -- pounds -- in the article.  Whereas the range of quantities needed to kill a person is expressed in units of 'milligrams'.  Therefore, consulting Google with the following question: How many milligrams are in a pound?  The following answer appears as shown below:

There are 453,592 milligrams in a pound.  The only unit conversion for this analysis is ready to be accomplished given the conversion factor obtained above.  Since there are 453,592 milligrams in a pound, the number of milligrams in 254 pounds can be determined as shown below:

The calculation above reveals that in 254 pounds of Fentanyl, there are 115,212,368 milligrams.  Now the amount of people which could be killed with 254 pounds of Fentanyl can be determined.  This is because all of the numbers are expressed in the same units of measurement -- milligrams.



Since the number cited in my previous blog post was a range of values 2-3 milligrams, the answer which is expected will also be a range.  Shown below are the two values which make up the range of the amount of Fentanyl needed to kill a single person:

And the upper limit of the range is 3 milligrams as shown below:

Our analysis shows that the total number of people which could be killed with 254 pounds of Fentanyl (which was seized at the border) is between 38.4 million and 58 million people.  Oh my goodness. These statistics need to be stated in news articles too.  The problem with stating the statistics is that there are no hard numbers which represent the LD50 of Fentanyl.



Regardless, the amount of Fentanyl needed is super small compared to the amount of heroin needed to kill a person.  Which really drives up the danger posed with seizing the drug.  If border agents or other law enforcement agencies do not have adequate training on handling the seizure of such an enormous amount, death could be a strong possibility.  Therefore, handling the Fentanyl coming across the border should be carried out with the utmost (and urgent) care to avoid any large catastrophe (or death).



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