Just a few miles from the White House, in Washington D.C.’s poorer neighbourhoods, the trade in
PCP is alive and kicking.
The hallucinogenic anaesthetic drug – mainly smoked via $20 PCP-soaked cigarettes called “dippers” – is the most frequently mentioned illegal substance in criminal case hearings at the city’s Superior Court after cocaine.
Over a quarter of DUI tests in the city come up positive for the drug. More than a third of arrestees who test positive for any drug in D.C. have PCP in their system, the
highest rate in the U.S., and more than double the proportion of those testing positive for opioids.
It’s not just a drug closely linked to crime. Data from the Center for Substance Use Research (CESAR) shows that of those admitted suffering from a drug overdose into Prince George’s Hospital Center, a hospital in Maryland which serves DC, around one in four test positive for PCP. Of all drug deaths in 2018 in DC, 14 percent involved PCP.
Yet, bizarrely, just 40 miles down the road, in Baltimore, PCP is almost unheard of.
At the Midtown Medical Center in Baltimore, a half-hour drive from Prince George’s Hospital, typically 0-2 percent of those admitted into emergency rooms in 2018 suffering from a drug overdose tested positive for PCP, according to CESAR data. Just 0.3 percent of drug deaths in 2018 in Baltimore involved PCP.
The contrast between these two cities is a reflection of the picture across the United States.
Analysis carried out by VICE World News has found that while in most areas PCP is MIA, there are hotspots seemingly scattered at random across the country where police have busted huge amounts of the drug during the COVID pandemic.
Most oddly, bearing in mind the transglobal nature of drug markets, PCP is a drug almost entirely restricted to the U.S. It has failed to gain traction anywhere else on the planet.
Why is this substance, unlike many other illicit drugs, so geographically specific, and what does this tell us about why people living in certain places take certain drugs?
PCP, chemical name phencyclidine, was born in America. It was synthesised in the mid-1950s by Michigan chemist Victor Maddox and patented by pharmaceutical firm Parke Davis (now a subsidiary of Pfizer) under the brand name Sernyl, for use as a surgical anaesthetic. However, the drug’s ability to cause hallucinations meant its use in medicine was swiftly curtailed.
In the 1960s the drug’s trippy qualities and feeling of floaty euphoria caught on with psychonauts and hippies seeking to
explore the mind. It attracted nicknames such as “angel dust”, “magic mist” and “wobble weed”.
But by the 1970s, as its use spread to a wider crowd of users, PCP gained a reputation on America’s West Coast as a “
killer drug”. Gil Scott Heron’s cautionary 1978 song
Angel Dust reflected attitudes that it was a drug best avoided. And by the 1980s, the media was flagging a PCP “epidemic” on the East Coast, particularly
New York and
D.C.
PCP’s particular reputation was a mash-up of the worst rumours about LSD and cocaine, of a mind-bending drug that gave users superhuman strength and made them jump off buildings. In the 1984 film
The Terminator, when Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character punches through a windscreen suffering no pain, the police presume he must be high on PCP. Those suspected of using the drug were treated as unhinged, out of control, and potentially lethal. Even though scientists
cast doubt on PCP’s ability to engender violence, others have said PCP can produce
psychosis and severe hyperthermia, which may cause violent and bizarre behaviour, including disrobing and running about. But like the hoary old stories from over a century ago about Black people on cocaine being
impervious to bullets, the “deranged” PCP user was weaponised by the authorities and the media..........
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