Xylazene is in the UK now?
Does anyone actually take that shit on purpose or just end up taking it through adulterated opioids? From what I've seen, Xylazene doesn't look at all enjoyable.
It is in the UK now and the first recorded death attributed to it was some poor man in England somewhere either last year or the year before - dunno if he took it on its own to try it or ODd by taking adulterated opioids but likely the latter because why would anyone want to take it given that we have all seen the reports from Philly in the USA etc.? But if you look on wedinos.org at heroin samples, many (most I think) have xylazine in them. It is used as a cut in heroin now and I don't know where in the supply chain it was going in. I shared something about it somewhere else in which the National Crime Agency explained their theories about how it is getting into supply and I can't remember if it is coming in via import of is being used as a cut down the chain. Obviously the xylazine itself is being imported either way. There are warnings being put out about xylazine and nitazenes generally.
I've never heard or known of anyone using xylazine without knowing it/recreationally. It seems as if suppliers and dealers are just copying the yanks due to greed. I had my first OD ever in ten years of on and off use, thought it was fentanyl as I went straight to black and woke up strapped to a board being taken to an ambulance. Now I am assuming it was xylazine. Lots of ODs are happening and I expect xylazine is the culprit.
Not sure how active nitazenes are in tablet form but active enough to be dangerous I am assuming.
And the short answer is that pretty much anyone using it is doing so because it has been used as a cut in heroin. Why it has showed up in codeine tablets likely mostly purchased on the cleartnet vendor sites I have no idea.
As
@ageingpartyfiend said, there will be calls for a crackdown on clearnet markets due to this, making the problem much worse. There are vendors who some tend to trust in terms of getting what they pay for but I have noticed strange things happening on clearnet sites, such as stock suddenly running out - good vendors will replace a usually trusted brand with another but some will just sell whatever they get.
I think that the nitazene problem will most likely affect the heroin market and I wouldn't be surprised if the MI5 or some part of the state apparatus were putting nitazenes into the benzo supply to take down the clearnet sites as this is the kind of shit the government here would most likely do (tin foil hat i know).
Lots of people are in danger, myself included, and I believe we need to make people aware of this problem by talking to drug workers and such. I am going to write an article about it from a harm reduction point of view (and without the tin-foil hat conspiracy theory of course).
