Using any street drug is now a game of Russian roulette, according to a city police chief grappling with a new cutting agent called “rhino tranq.”
Since DailyMail.com first wrote about the drug, formally known as medetomidine, more cities are reporting surges of overdoses that the drugs cannot reverse.
The sedative is 100 to 200 times more potent than xylazine, an animal tranquilizer used to increase the potency of everything from cocaine to heroin and fentanyl.
It does not appear on test strips and cannot be treated with Narcan, making it a silent killer that neither police nor users can track.
Rick Lorah, deputy director of criminal investigations in Erie, Pennsylvania, not far from Philadelphia, where more than 160 rhino tranquilizer-related overdoses occurred in just four days last month.
He said, “So if it’s happening in Philadelphia, it’s happening in New York, it’s happening in Pittsburgh, it’s happening here.”
Drugs are used and circulated openly in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, and many are in a trance-like state.
He saying that the new adulterant drugs are ‘all cheaper than the drug being sold’. Each one appears to be deadlier.
Michigan has lost three residents since March to the medications combined with the tranquilizer, which is approved as a medication for dogs and cats.
And Chicago officials saw “massive overdose outbreaks” in just a few days in mid-May. It was the first time the drug was found in the illicit drug supply.
But it’s such a new addition to the drug supply that most states have been caught off guard and are still struggling to keep track of its extent.
Overdoses have increased throughout May and early June, and the drug has also been detected in San Francisco, Indianapolis, Toronto, Canada, Maryland and more.
The drug acts in the brain differently than an opioid like fentanyl, which binds to specific receptors in the brain.
When a person overdoses on fentanyl or heroin, paramedics can administer the reverse medication Narcan, giving the person life-saving time to seek additional medical care.
But medetomidine, like xylazine, are alpha-2 agonists, which Narcan does not affect at all. They are often called “zombie drugs.” People who take them often fall asleep, even while standing, or collapse on the street in a daze.
While law enforcement has been trying to crack down on drugs containing xylazine and fentanyl, cartels and drug suppliers have seen a new opportunity in medetomidine.
The drug is impossible to detect with the standard test strips used to detect the deadly fentanyl in heroin and cocaine.
It causes a drastic drop in heart rate, reduces blood pressure, and decreases activity in the brain, making the user more likely to suffer cardiac arrest.
These risks are greatly exacerbated when the drug is combined with another sedative such as xylazine in addition to fentanyl.
Dr. Daniel Ciccarone, who has studied the effects of drug use for decades at the University of California, San Francisco, saying: ‘The concern is that because it’s sedating, that could go in the wrong direction when you’re already taking a sedating opioid like fentanyl.
“Now we have two sedative drugs, which we could call a kind of double depressant combination, and that would increase the risk of overdose.”
Officials in Philadelphia, where the Kensington neighborhood has become an open-air drug market, issued a health alert about medetomidine last month that said: “To date, all samples containing medetomidine also contained xylazine and fentanyl.”
Neither medetomidine nor xylazine are approved for human use; neither are its two antidotes, which could have potentially disastrous consequences for the human body.
Those antidotes would cause extremely high blood pressure and a rapid heart rate and therefore “should not be used to reverse the adverse effects of medetomidine,” according to Philadelphia officials.
Daniel Teixeira da Silva, director of the Division of Substance Use Prevention and Harm Reduction at the Philadelphia Department of Health, saying This is because the drug is so new to illicit supply: “We don’t really know the effect on humans.”
Xylazine, which entered health officials’ radars in 2018, is known to restrict blood vessels, cutting off the flow of oxygen-rich blood to skin tissues. When tissue is deprived of oxygen, it can die, causing increasingly worsening skin ulcers that may require amputation.
It’s unclear whether medetomidine would have the same meat-spoiling effect, but it is known to cause constriction of blood vessels, increasing that risk.
In addition to the 160 overdoses in Philadelphia in just four days, three people in Michigan have died with the drug in their systems.
Meanwhile, Chicago officials saw “massive overdose outbreaks” over a few days around the same time in May that Philadelphia was experiencing a surge.
Meanwhile, Toronto’s drug enforcement service first identified him in the city’s drug supply in late December.
Hayley Thompson, director of the drug control program, saying: ‘Since then, we have seen (medetomidine and its analog) present in 11 percent of the expected fentanyl samples we checked, and that is noteworthy.
“And at this time, we don’t believe that many people are aware that this drug is circulating in the unregulated drug supply, which is why we are trying to spread this communication so quickly.”
Drug cartels in Mexico, specifically those in Jalisco and Sinaloa, have flooded the United States with fentanyl and other illegal and highly addictive drugs.
But at some point in the supply chain, possibly initially in clandestine Mexican laboratories, or possibly once the drugs have entered the United States, they are cut and adulterated with cheap, poorly regulated additives that increase the effect of opioids.
Head of the Indiana Drug Enforcement Agency saying: ‘I try to tell people that when drugs come here to Indianapolis… they could change hands six, seven, eight times before a drug dealer sells them to someone here.
“So whenever that changes hands, anyone can put whatever they want in it.”