Using any street drug is now a game of Russian Roulette, according to a police chief in a city grappling with a new cutting agent called “rhino tranq.”
Since DailyMail.com first wrote about the drug, formally known as medetomidine, more and more cities have reported waves of overdoses that cannot be reversed with drugs.
The sedative is 100 to 200 times more powerful than xylazine, an animal tranquilizer used to increase the potency of everything from cocaine to heroin and fentanyl.
It cannot be seen on test strips and cannot be treated with Narcan, making it a silent killer that neither police nor users can track.
Rick Lorah, deputy chief of the criminal investigation in Erie, Pennsylvania, not far from Philadelphia, where more than 160 rhino tranq overdoses occurred in just four days last month.
He said, “So if it happens in Philadelphia, it happens in New York, it happens in Pittsburgh, it will happen here.”
Drugs are openly used and distributed in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, with many bent over in a trance-like state
He said that the new adulterants are ‘all cheaper than the drug being sold’. They all seem deadlier.”
Michigan has lost three residents since March to the drugs laced with the tranquilizer, which is approved as a drug for cats and dogs.
And officials in Chicago saw “mass outbreaks of overdoses” for just a few days in mid-May. It was the first time the drug had ever been found in the illegal 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 up with how widespread it is.
Overdoses escalated in May and early June, and the drug has also been found in San Francisco, Indianapolis, Toronto, Canada, Maryland and more.
The drug works differently on the brain than an opioid such as fentanyl, which binds to specific receptors in the brain.
When a person experiences a fentanyl or heroin overdose, paramedics can administer the reversal drug Narcan, giving the person life-saving time to seek additional medical care.
But medetomidine, as well as xylazine, are alpha-2 agonists, which are not affected by Narcan at all. They are often referred to as ‘zombie drugs’. People who take them often nod off to sleep even while standing, or fall down in a daze on the street.
As law enforcement agencies try to crack down on xylazine and fentanyl drugs, cartels and drug suppliers have seen a new opportunity in medetomidine.
The drug is impossible to detect with standard test strips used to screen heroin and cocaine for the deadly fentanyl.
It causes a drastic drop in heart rate, lowers blood pressure and reduces activity in the brain, increasing the risk of the user going into cardiac arrest.
These risks are further increased if 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, said: ‘The concern is that because it’s narcotic, if you’re already taking a narcotic opioid like fentanyl, it could go the wrong way.
“Now you have two narcotic medications, a kind of double downer combination, we might call it, and that would increase the risk of overdose.”
Officials in Philadelphia, where the Kensington neighborhood has turned into an open-air drug market, have issued an order health warning about medetomidine last month it said: ‘To date, all samples containing medetomidine also contained xylazine and fentanyl.’
Neither medetomidine nor xylazine are approved for human use; nor do their two antidotes, which could have potentially disastrous effects on the human body.
These antidotes are said to cause extremely high blood pressure and increased heart rate and thus “should not be used to reverse the adverse effects of medetomidine,” Philly officials said.
Daniel Teixeira da Silva, Chief of Substance Abuse Prevention and Harm Reduction at the Philly Health Department, said because the drug is so new in the illegal supply: ‘We don’t really know what the effect on people is.’
Xylazine, which appeared on health officials’ radar in 2018, is known to constrict blood vessels and cut off oxygen-rich blood flow to skin tissues. When tissue is deprived of oxygen, it can die, leading to progressively worsening skin ulcers that require amputation.
It’s not clear whether medetomidine would have the same flesh-rotting effect, but it is known to cause narrowing of blood vessels, which increases 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, for just a few days around the same time in May that Philadelphia was experiencing a surge, officials in Chicago saw “mass outbreaks of overdoses.”
Meanwhile, Toronto’s drug enforcement agency first identified it in the city’s drug stash in late December.
Hayley Thompson, drug monitoring program manager, said: ‘Since then, we have found (medetomidine and its analogue) in 11 percent of the expected fentanyl samples we monitor, and that’s worth noting.
“And at this point, we don’t think many people know that this drug is circulating in the unregulated drug supply.” That’s why we’re trying to get this communication out so quickly.”
Drug cartels in Mexico, particularly the Jalisco and Sinaloa cartels, have flooded the U.S. with fentanyl and other illegal, highly addictive drugs.
But at some point in the supply chain, possibly at the beginning in clandestine Mexican labs, or possibly once the drugs enter the U.S., they are adulterated and adulterated with cheap, poorly regulated additives that enhance an opioid high.
The head of the Indiana Drug Enforcement Administration said: “I try to tell people that when drugs get here in Indianapolis…it can change hands six, seven, eight times before a drug dealer sells it to someone here.
“So every time hands are exchanged, everyone can put whatever they want into it.”