News An animal tranquilizer is making street drugs even more dangerous

[thegreenhand]

An animal tranquilizer is making street drugs even more dangerous​

Martha Bebinger
NPR
5 Aug 2022

Excerpts:

Approaching a van that distributes safe supplies for drug use in Greenfield, Mass., a man named Kyle noticed an alert about xylazine.

"Xylazine?" he asked, sounding out the unfamiliar word. "Tell me more."

A street-outreach team from Tapestry Health delivered what's becoming a routine warning. Xylazine is an animal tranquilizer. It's not approved for humans, but it's showing up in about half of the drug samples that Tapestry tests in the rolling hills of western Massachusetts. It's appearing mostly in the illegal fentanyl supply but also in cocaine.

Xylazine surged first in some areas of Puerto Rico and then in Philadelphia, where it was found in 91% of opioid samples last year, the most recent reporting period. Data from January to mid-June shows that xylazine was in 28% of drug samples tested by the Massachusetts Drug Supply Data Stream (MADDS), a state-funded network of community drug-checking and advisory groups that uses mass spectrometers to let people know what's in bags or pills purchased on the street.

Some areas of the state, including western Massachusetts, are seeing xylazine in 50% to 75% of samples. In Greenfield, that's a big change from last year, when xylazine wasn't a concern.

 

[thegreenhand]

Journalists sure love when they can call a new drug an "animal tranquilizer"

I feel like they were using the same language about fent 5-10 years ago