Cocaine and Fentanyl Look Identical

You cannot reliably tell what a drug is by looking at it.

In King County, the Medical Examiner’s Office uses the term “powder confusion” to describe overdose deaths in which the evidence suggests someone used what they believed was cocaine, but the drug was actually fentanyl.

Cocaine and fentanyl can look nearly identical in both powder and rock form. A white powder that looks like cocaine may be cocaine, or it may be fentanyl. There is no reliable way to know by appearance alone.

This isn't the same as cocaine being "laced" with fentanyl.

When fentanyl is found in an overdose involving someone who believed they were using cocaine, it's easy to assume that fentanyl was added to cocaine. But this has never happened in King County, according to the Medical Examiner’s Office. The substance was never cocaine to begin with.

Someone may have purchased, received, or used fentanyl believing it was cocaine. This is powder confusion.

Don't guess. Test.

If you don't use fentanyl, you need to be testing your drugs, every time.

It doesn't matter how your drugs look, where they came from, or how much you trust the person who gave or sold them to you. Test your drugs every time. Fentanyl test strips are inexpensive, easy to use, and testing takes only a few minutes.

Your life is worth the three minutes it takes to test your drugs.