It’s easy to categorize addicted drug users: “He uses heroin,” or “she uses crack.” But those labels don’t apply anymore. That’s because there are almost no pure drugs out there. Almost everything is a mélange of random shit — uppers, downers, cough medicine, horse tranquilizers, and everything in between.
Yesterday I met with Sarah Riley, director of the lab that does the postmortem toxicology testing for St. Louis. She gave me a tour of the lab (which is awesome), let me take photos of the drug samples, and discussed trends she’s seeing in the chemicals they analyze.
Thankfully, xylazine — the veterinary tranquilizer that causes disgusting open wounds — has been decreasing in the area, but novel benzodiazepines (basically, knock-off Xanax) are rising. And fentanyl remains in just about everything.
One distressing trend is the many cases she sees involving older Black men, often in their 60s, whose toxicology indicates they’re habitual cocaine users. But they’re dying from fentanyl, which they likely don’t realize is tainting their cocaine.
Riley also receives samples confiscated from prisons. The drug landscape is very different there, as synthetic drugs that can be sprayed onto paper and sent through the mail are more common, particularly synthetic cannabinoids like K2. The problem has gotten so bad that Missouri won’t even let you mail a letter directly to a prisoner anymore. The letter has to be sent to a processing center in Florida, which scans it and emails it to the prisoner.*
*Speaking of which, I’ve started a PenPal program for Missouri prisoners. If you would like to be a PenPal with an inmate email me at ben.westhoff@gmail.com and I’ll send you the info.
Riley told me about one prisoner who had been sent a page of bible verses (above) that was sprayed with K2. The prisoner ate part of the page and died; the coroner knew this because the page was found in the prisoner’s stomach.
Riley is extremely well-informed about the drug crisis, and my biggest takeaway from our conversation was that, when you buy drugs on the street, you have no idea what you’re getting. You’re not getting, say, pure cocaine. You’re not even getting cocaine adulterated with just fentanyl. You’re getting cocaine adulterated with fentanyl and a dozen other random things.
Take the drug product sold in St. Louis as “Sneezy 2.” The user believed it contained fentanyl, but as you can see below, that was just the tip of the iceberg.
The test results show that the sample also contained a fentanyl analogue, a novel benzodiazepine, caffeine, cocaine, another novel benzo, Benadryl, another novel benzo, a surgical anesthetic, a member of a class of synthetic opioids known as nitazines, xylazine (which was the major component), and fentanyl precursors.
And “Sneezy 2” was not an outlier in the report she showed me, which included test results of drug samples collected by her network last week. All of them contained many, many different chemicals. Check out the drug below, being sold as “Abortion Dumpster 4 Biden.”
This crazy mixture also has quinine (found in tonic water) and naloxone, aka the opioid reversal drug known as Narcan!
Why all this crap is in street drugs I don’t know. I suspect traffickers gravitate towards whatever chemicals Chinese laboratories are selling mostly cheaply. One week that might be xylazine, while the next week it might be novel benzos. At the end of the month perhaps the trafficker finds himself with a bunch of leftover containers of powder, so he just starts mixing stuff together.
Or maybe there’s more art to it. Riley described one deposed dealer saying that he chose his mixture’s ingredients so his product stood out amongst the competition. It’s possible that drug cocktails are evolving in a way not entirely dissimilar to how alcohol cocktails have evolved over the years. I’ve even heard about fentanyl molecules being fused with psychedelics and empathogens.
Whatever the case, it’s bad news. Street drugs are cheaper than ever, but taking them is basically like putting on a blindfold and asking someone to spike your drink. You don’t know what you’re getting, you don’t know what the effects will be and, if you overdose, first responders won’t necessarily know how to treat you.
So don’t take drugs, kids! Or, at the very least, don’t take anything that hasn’t been thoroughly tested first.
This would be a terrific time to introduce authentic Drug Abuse Education into the schools again. It's bound to be an uphill climb, though, based on the reflex antipathy of teenagers to any pronouncements on the topic by Official Authority, brought on by decades of wolf-crying over the evils of marijuana. Few of the youngsters even appear to be familiar with the phenomenon of Potentiation, for that matter. Potentiation got more discussion in the pre-DARE era of the 1970s. It's a simple enough concept to grasp. But to begin with, someone has to at least know that there is such a thing. https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/potentiation
After that, they have to realize that combining any two central nervous system depressants increases the potency in a way that multiplies it, not merely adding to it, and that the most common potentiating substance is alcohol.
That used to be the single most important thing to learn, as far as education about drug effects.
Now that we're in the street fentanyl era, where less--often much less--than one milligram of a manufactured synthetic opioid can be a lethal dose, the most important thing to know is how easily it is to contaminate practically any street drug with lethal doses of various chemicals, some of which elude ready identification by laboratory analysis.
If the illicit drugs trade wasn't riding on the momentum of its rep--over half a century of Forbidden Fruit Outlaw Cool, an aura enshrined by prohibition and criminalization--I think it would most likely be easier for young people to stare the bare facts in the face, that after decades of fake wolf-crying, the wolves got here. The retail street market has finally descended to the era of literal Chemical Russian Roulette.