News Pilot testing program in Maryland could save life and limb as new illegal drug danger emerges

[thegreenhand]

Pilot testing program in Maryland could save life and limb as new illegal drug danger emerges​

Meredith Cohn
Baltimore Sun
2 Jun 2022

Excerpts:

A young woman in a pink hoodie and a blond bun clutched a plastic bag filled with 20 fresh syringes and a box of naloxone, the antidote to opioid overdoses. Jason Bienert, a wound care nurse at a needle exchange program in Cecil County, noticed her bandaged hand and offered to take a look at it. She declined and exited swiftly to a waiting car.

“That was the first time I met her,” Bienert said. “I just gave her a little love and didn’t push it.” Bienert hoped over time the young woman would trust him and accept medical care.

He knows she’ll need it because, thanks to a new federally backed testing program, he already knows what’s causing her wounds.

He and nurses at seven other needle exchange programs in Maryland have been mailing swabs collected from users of street drugs to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg since October. The findings have revealed a new scourge in the long-running drug epidemic: xylazine (ZY-lah-zeen), an animal tranquilizer.

In every batch tested recently, xylazine has turned up as part of the drug mixture. It eats at the flesh on people’s legs, arms, and most commonly, their hands.

Ed Sisco, a chemist leading the testing project at NIST, wants to give Tabor and Bienert every bit of information in hopes it might help. The lab supplies the high-powered equipment to the state for free, with the Maryland Department of Health footing the bill to mail the envelopes.

Officials say conventional drug labs can’t provide the same information.

The NIST lab accepts only swabs of the drug packaging; the bags that dealers wrapped around the drugs and the needles are considered hazardous and pose challenges to transport.

Sisco said the lab rarely finds heroin anymore, identifying instead increasingly more powerful forms of fentanyl such as fluorofentanyl, methamphetamines, cocaine and other synthetic stimulants known as bath salts.

The lab has analyzed about 600 samples from the Maryland clinics so far. It takes only a minute or two, though turnaround time depends on the incoming mail delivery. Anonymous results are dropped in a spreadsheet by location for all the programs participating to see.

Full article here.

 

[thegreenhand]

Pretty cool stuff from Maryland, hopefully the program has enough funding to provide the drug checking services for all who need it