One kilo of the fentanyl he brewed up, he said, had to be cut—diluted—into fifty kilos. At a fifty-to-one dilution, he said, it wouldn’t kill anyone. He knew this, he said, because he’d tested his product on mice and found that, at fifty to one, the mice didn’t die. He relayed this information to the people who took his powder, but whether these crucial instructions traveled to the streets he had no idea. Investigators in Chicago, in fact, found that street dealers, thinking they had heroin on their hands, were reluctant to dilute it. Weak heroin was a constant complaint among customers, who
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