A Kensington fentanyl seller lays out a utilitarian accounting that claims each bag sold is net life-positive. The seller donates $1.80 per bag to the Against Malaria Foundation (GiveWell cost per life ~ $5,500), estimates a fatality rate of roughly 1 in 4,000 bags, and computes lives saved per bag as D/G ≈ 0.000327 minus fatality risk p ≈ 0.00025, yielding a net +0.00008 lives per bag. Using this model, 21,000 bags in 2025 correspond to about 5.3 local deaths offset by roughly 6.9 child lives saved in Malawi, for a net gain of ~1.6 lives. The seller also distributes Narcan and test strips, stamps packs “EFFECTIVE,” and appeals to longtermist weighting to magnify the benefits of preventing childhood malaria over shorter local life-years lost.
The piece presses a counterfactual point: if this seller stopped, someone else with no offsets would replace him quickly, so his activity supposedly reduces net harm. Commenters raise concrete objections: donation incidence (buyers may effectively pay the $1.80), double-counting of distributed Narcan, undercounting fatality rates, age-weighting and DALY adjustments, moral side-constraints that forbid knowingly selling lethal products, and the argument that a high-earning desk job could donate more without selling drugs. The seller responds to some critiques (reweighting by DALYs, operational constraints), but several empirical and ethical challenges to the calculation remain.
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