How can I tell if a pill is fake?

You cannot tell by looking. Pressed pills copy the imprint, colour, shape and score line of the real thing. If it did not come from a pharmacy in its own packaging, treat it as pressed and test it with a fentanyl strip.

How do I test a pill for fentanyl?

Crush the whole pill, dissolve it in about a quarter cup of water, dip a fentanyl test strip to the line for 15 seconds, lay it flat and wait three minutes. One line means fentanyl was found. Two lines, even a faint second one, means it was not.

Does a negative fentanyl strip mean a pill is safe?

No. A strip only says whether fentanyl was found in the part you tested. It does not detect nitazenes or xylazine, does not say how much fentanyl is present, and does not tell you whether the pill is the drug it claims to be at all.

Is this pill real?

You can't tell by looking

A pressed pill copies the imprint, the colour, the shape and the score line. Matching it to a photo tells you what it is meant to be, not what is in it. If it did not come from a pharmacy, in its own packaging, treat it as pressed.

The DEA's own lab numbers move year to year: 76% of the fentanyl pills it tested in 2023 carried a potentially lethal dose, and 29% in 2025. Take the better year and it is still one pill in three, and nothing about the one in your hand says which it is.

DEA, December 2025 · fiscal years, pills already known to contain fentanyl.

The ones most often pressed

Sold as Oxycodone 30 mgSmall round blue, M on one side, 30 on the other
Sold as Xanax 2 mgWhite bar, scored into four
Sold as Adderall 30 mgRound orange, scored
Sold as PercocetOval white or blue, a number on one side

If yours is one of these, that is not a coincidence. They are pressed because they sell.

So test it

A fentanyl strip, done properly

Takes about five minutes and costs the pill. That is the trade.

In this order

Crush the whole pill into a fine powder.All of it, not a scraping. Fentanyl does not spread evenly through a press — one edge can hold most of it. Testing a corner tests the corner.
Stir it into about a quarter cup of water.Four tablespoons. If it was sold as ecstasy, use double — a strong MDMA or meth solution can give a false positive. The binder may not fully dissolve; that is fine.
Dip the strip to the line for 15 seconds, lay it flat, wait three minutes.Do not dip past the line.
One line means fentanyl. Two lines means not found.It is backwards from a pregnancy test. The second line can be very faint — faint still counts as two.
One line: do not take it.If you are going to anyway, a fraction of it, not alone, naloxone in the room, and no more until you know how that fraction landed.

DanceSafe's strip instructions · amounts and timings are theirs.

What two lines does not tell you

It says present, not how much
A strip is a yes or a no. A pill can carry a trace or a lethal dose and show the same single line. There is no reading it for strength.
It does not see nitazenes or xylazine
Fentanyl strips detect fentanyl and most of its analogues. They do not react to nitazenes, a separate family of synthetic opioids that turns up in pressed pills, or to xylazine, which is a sedative and not an opioid. Xylazine has its own strip.
A negative on part of a pill is not a negative on the pill
Because fentanyl clumps, a scraping can test clean while the rest does not. This is why the instructions say the whole pill, and why a friend's pill from the same bag testing clean says nothing about yours.
A clean pill can still be the wrong drug
A bar with no fentanyl in it may be bromazolam or etizolam rather than alprazolam — longer, stronger, and worse with alcohol. A strip cannot tell you what a pill is, only one thing it is not.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of safety. Two lines is one thing ruled out, not a pill ruled in.

Look it up

What that imprint has contained before

DrugsData is Erowid's lab programme. It publishes what pills sent in by the public actually contained, and the results can be searched by marking. It cannot tell you about yours — a pill with the same stamp came off a different press on a different day — but it shows what the stamp has been used to sell.

Search DrugsData by marking

It is an archive, not a service for tonight. Lab results take weeks, and at the time of writing DrugsData is not taking new samples.

Getting strips

Where to get them

Campus health or student wellnessMany hand out strips and naloxone free, no questions, no record. You do not need an appointment.
NEXT DistroMail-based harm reduction supplies in the US. What they can send depends on your state.
DanceSafeStrips, xylazine strips and reagent kits, bought and posted.

Either way

If the honest answer to “is it real” is “don't know”, have naloxone in the room and someone who knows how to use it.