A powerful new drug that rots human flesh is compounding America’s opioid crisis, public health officials have warned. Known on the streets as “Tranq Dope”, the drug is a mix of fentanyl – a synthetic opioid that’s shattering young lives across the country – and xylazine, an animal sedative that is making its way into the illicit drug supply. Xylazine has hit Philadelphia particularly hard – about one-third of all fatal opioid overdoses in 2019 were related to the drug.
But the drug was also involved in fatal overdoses in 23 states in 2019, with the highest rate — 67 percent — happening in the Northeast, a CDC report published in 2021 found.
Dealers are using xylazine, which is uncontrolled by the federal government and cheap, to cut fentanyl, which is up to 50 times stronger than heroin.
In addition to enhancing the high from fentanyl, it literally rots people’s skin.
Raw wounds erupt into a scaly crust of dead tissue called eschar which, if untreated, can lead to amputation.
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On the hot summer streets, she saw people whose tranq wounds were covered with fleas and maggots.
Even so, she told the paper, “I could not pull myself away from that drug”.
“If somebody’s overdosing on xylazine or on heroin cut with xylazine, that naloxone is not going to have much of an effect on the part of the overdose that’s driven by the xylazine,” said Doctor Scott Hadland, an addiction doctor and chief of adolescent and young adult medicine at the MassGeneral Hospital for Children in Boston.
Supportive measures can be used if a person is attended to early enough, such as resuscitation, getting them fluids and other sorts of hospital care, Hadland said in response to the CDC report into xylazine-related drug deaths.
“But this is much more difficult to manage out in the community because it’s inevitably going to be an overdose that involves multiple substances including opioids,” he said.
While the rate of overdose deaths where xylazine was listed as a cause of death was low at 1.2 percent in 2019, the report states that the animal tranquiliser’s detection may be underestimated.
That’s because routine post-death toxicology tests “might not have included tests for xylazine, and current testing protocols for xylazine are not standard”.
“It has been going on for a time but there’s also a lot of indications from local authorities that the problem is worsening, particularly here in the Northeast,” said Hadland.
One or more other drugs were also listed as the cause of the overdose deaths, including heroin and cocaine, with fentanyl being the most common, according to the CDC report.
