Hollywood’s Sobering New Reality of Fentanyl Lacing

The ultra-powerful synthetic painkiller is increasingly mixed with other drugs, from cocaine to Xanax and Adderall, leading to a spate of high-profile overdoses and deaths across the entertainment community: “People often don’t know that they’re taking it.”

In Hollywood, where cocaine use has long been a party aid of choice, to the point of caricature, fentanyl’s infiltration into the illicit market has put the entertainment community on edge — what was once simply the risky business of indulgence can now be a far more lethal gamble.

Experts say the lacing of fentanyl into other substances is both inadvertent as well as intentional. Contamination of the black-market drug supply can be caused by negligence during manufacture and transport. But there’s also a business incentive among traffickers …