'Millions of lethal doses' of heroin were actually 99.999% water in federal 'drug' bust

To be fair, they weren’t 99.999% water until after they were blasted into the ocean by a hellfire missile.

Don't care still having a hit

The only H in that heroin was for homeopathy

Homeopathic heroin?

Vibe heroin
Man, if homeopathy worked, those guys could have been billionaires!
- It does work for some things, they just call it different stuff.
  https://www.newscientist.com/article/2477790-daily-doses-of-peanuts-could-desensitise-adults-with-the-allergy/
dihydrogen oxide.
They seized it for RFK Jr.
It's used for microdosing.

Doing a little napkin math here, that's about a half an ounce of heroin mixed into 385 gallons of water.

That seems more like the 55 gallon drums had previously been filled with heroin, but were drained and refilled with water, and just a little residue was leftover.

Or a false positive to begin with in the cops don't want to admit they made a mistake. False positives are way higher sometimes with Trace Amounts. Plus the drug testing Labs try to give the results the cops want.
- Plus the drug testing Labs try to give the results the cops want.
  Source? That's a strong claim...
How many lethal doses of water is that?
- with an LD50 exceeding 90,000 mg/kg (90 g/kg) body weight in rats; drinking six liters in three hours has caused the death of a human
  Doesn't say the size of the human but guestimating 3 gallons should be enough for most people, would make that 130 lethal doses or so from 385 gallons of water.
- Let's call that 1500 liters of water. Assuming that drinking 10 liters of water in a short timeframe will almost certainly kill you somehow or another, 150 doses?

These were always full of water, I promise.

Jokes aside, isn't all tapwater just diluted heroin when you think about it?

Jokes aside, isn't all tapwater just diluted heroin when you think about it?
If you were into homeopathy, you'd claim that diluted heroin is more potent than the stuff you buy on the street! 💁‍♂️
You drink diluted piss. Think about it.
- And all piss has heroin in it.

dihydrogen monoxide is pretty lethal

100% of people who ingest it die.
- It's also extremely addictive, most people die of withdrawal in just 3 days without a dose
- Well, we don't know that. There are plenty of people who have ingested it but not died.
- No, just those that ingest way to much or inhale to much of it into their lungs.
  </pedantia>

Okay, I really want to know why these guys were transporting barrels of water with 0.001% heroin in them. Was it a con? A test run? Barrel re-use? A case of cops not having heroin on hand to frame them?

I'm just baffled as to why you'd be hauling around eight barrels of water and how the trace amounts of heroin got in them.

Is it too far fetched that the cops got rich by replacing the heroin with water? Initial suspects would be happy to go along with the lie just to avoid life in jail.
Well, if you need to catch a snitch, you set up a few false operations. Tell each person something different and see which one is busted.
0.001% should had been bellow the threshold of any reasonable test, otherwise all of us are carrying drugs
- I'm carrying drugs for sure!
It was probably just infused with poppy seed oil, for cooking.
- Then why the water. Cooking oils and water don’t mix.
EDIT: I mathed wrong, see comments below.
Just my 2¢ as a complete nobody who likes to think about stuff and Google some numbers, take it for what it's worth.
Of course the numbers here are all very fuzzy, but if we take the inaccurate initial estimate of "millions" of lethal doses at face value (which you probably shouldn't, these estimates always seem to be massively inflated,) .001% of 2 million (the smallest number you can really call "millions") is still 2000 lethal doses. Probably several times that in actual doses since most addicts aren't looking to outright kill themselves.
I don't know the physics/chemistry of how heroin dissolves into water, let alone how pure the heroin involved was or any of the other factors that would play into this, so these numbers are probably gonna be way off, but 8 55gal drums of water is 440 gallons. .001% of that is .44 gallons of heroin. And I believe that would theoretically be a solid block of heroin with that volume, not a loose power where some of that volume is air.
That's an upper bound, because that's not how volume works when you dissolve stuff, s let's go ahead and assume the actual amount of heroin is ¼ of that (based on nothing but a wild guess, easy math and an assumption that I'm wildly overestimating) so .11 gallons, (1.76 cups, a 2.94 inch cube, 416.395 ml)
With the amount of googling I was willing to do, I couldn't find the density of heroin, but anhydrous morphine is apparently 1.32 g/cm³, so let's roll with that. 1.32×416.395 = 549.6414g (a little over a pound for my fellow Americans)
Let's go ahead and call that 500g or ½kg to make math easy and further account for me probably overestimating things earlier.
A little googling tells me the value of heroin is between $10,000-$100,000/kg, so for half of that we're looking at $5,000-$50,000 of heroin in those drums (assuming that all of my many assumptions weren't too far off-base)
So for that kind of money, assuming they have the means to recover the heroin at the other end (industrial freeze dryer maybe? Not sure what the best method would be,) I could definitely see it being worthwhile to have a couple mooks rent a u haul to smuggle heroin from point a to point b this way.
Also gives you a little insurance against the driver stealing any of it en route. It's not easy to just walk off with a full barrel, and if they siphoned some off, they probably wouldn't have the means to recover it, and even if they did it wouldn't be much.
One of the barrels tested negative, and I kind of suspect they didn't just put in a barrel of plain water for shits and giggles, so I have a hunch that the plan was to dilute the heroin down to below the detection threshold for whatever field test kit cops usually have, so if they got stopped they'd just say they have barrels of water, which would be weird but probably not illegal, but either they just had bad luck and the cops had a better batch of test strips than usual, or someone fucked up dividing the heroin between the barrels.
Again, take that all for what it's worth.
- Someone else here said the total amount of heroin in those barrels was less than half an ounce. That sounds like they were reusing dirty barrels for some other purpose, not transporting heroin. I have no idea why someone would move barrels of water around in a truck, but I don't think it is illegal.
May have been a bad smuggling operation? Mix it with water, ship the water, then boil off the water leaving the heroin? Too bad doing that ruins the heroin.
- That's like 6,000 pounds of water for a few ounces of heroin. There equipment is either off by a factor of ten or more and it's contamination or probably more likely the cop sprinkled some in.
Maybe they already removed the heroin and a little bit leaked into the water. Could have been a heroin "core" inside the barrels to fool dogs.

So how much of that would you have to drink to get high? Can you get high from drinking it?

Also

The case dates back to January 2024, when four men were arrested at a Motel 6 in Tigard after investigators said they were transporting a massive shipment of liquid heroin from Yakima, Washington, to the Portland area.

Officials said at the time that the men were driving a rented U-Haul truck with eight 55-gallon barrels inside and that seven of the barrels tested positive for heroin. Six men were eventually charged in connection with the case.

What the fuck were they doing driving around barrels of water?

If they're a cop, just tell them it's fentanyl, and they'll pass out as soon as the water touches their skin
That's the new big gulp size at 7 eleven
you will probably get water intoxication before you can even get heroin high.
Occupy cops so the real shipment just slips through I guess.

This is gonna be a stupid question but is heroin a liquid? I always assumed it was some sort of crystal

Sooo... it's complicated.
To produce heroin you need a specific species of poppy, called oddly enough an "opium poppy".
You gently slice the heads of the poppy to extract a milky liquid. That's the base for a whole HOST of drugs depending on how you process it, but yes, it starts life as a liquid.
Opium sap -> Morphine -> Heroin.
Man, now I'm envisioning a whole series of black market "How It's Made" videos.
https://youtu.be/6o4zOMNlSco
- Probably more of a suspension than just a liquid, but chemistry was never my strong suit

Maybe the cops have a false positive on the tests. Maybe they don't want to admit it's a false positive so they don't have to admit they were wrong to arrest them in the first place.

Placebo