Psychedelia.dk

You should really stop doing cocaine. Not because it's addictive, or anything, but because it's likely laced with levamisole, a veterinary drug used for de-worming livestock, and it will make your flesh rot off.

A new report being published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology finds six patients who "developed purple-colored patches of necrotic skin on their ears, nose, cheeks and other parts of their body," apparently thanks to levamisole-cut coke. And, they say, that's just "the tip of the iceberg in a looming public health problem"!

According to the Department of Justice, some 70 percent of cocaine (most of it distributed in and around New York and L.A.) is cut with levamisole. We'd say, Who cares? Doesn't this just mean that every investment banker in New York will lose both ears? but our understanding is that i-bankers have moved on to Adderall and the ground-up finger bones of poor people. If you are in a bad rotting-flesh situation, we recommend switching drug dealers, which apparently worked for one patient the doctors wrote about in their report.

Meanwhile in Russia, the government and medical authorities are agitating against "krokodil" ("Крокодил" or "crocodile"), an insane newish opiate cooked by addicts in their kitchens out of "gasoline, paint thinner, hydrochloric acid, iodine and red phosphorous" plus the key ingredient, codeine. Why is it called "crocodile"? Why, because bursting blood vessels at the injection site (which can be anywhere on the body! Even the forehead!) turns the skin "greenish and scaly."

Flesh-Eating Drugs Hit U.S., Russia "The average user," Time reports, "does not live longer than two or three years, and the few who manage to quit usually come away disfigured." Animal New York collected a few disgusting photos; they could be fake, but the Russian news film to the left is plenty gross and plenty real. (Don't watch it on a full stomach.)

As it is, there's not much the Russian government is currently doing to help, meaning that the care and treatment for the population of addicts—some 2.5 million total, with the number of krokdil addicts somewhere in the hundreds of thousands—lies largely with Russian Evangelical churches, which run some 500 rehab centers. A government meeting about the problem, Time writes, "has led to a meandering public debate" about the country's drug policies, but no real change yet.

In 2004, a controversy erupted in the horse-racing world. A string of trainers with long and distinguished reputations were accused of doping their horses after aminorex, an amphetamine-like stimulant, was detected in their animals' urine. The penalty for doping horses with aminorex is a one- to five-year suspension and a career-ending stigma. Accusations flew, the trainers protested their innocence, and scientists stepped in to investigate.

It turned out the whole thing was an accident: The horses had been injected with levamisole for deworming, which their bodies metabolized into speed. Studies in the 1970s had discovered that dogs experienced "mood elevation" after receiving doses of levamisole. And a 1998 study at Vanderbilt University showed that levamisole eased withdrawal symptoms in rats addicted to morphine.

That study caught the attention of Dr. Mike Clark, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harborview Medical Center, who also studies cocaine addiction in lab rats. "According to the study, levamisole acts on all three monoamine neurotransmitters," he says. "That's exactly what you'd expect from something that potentiates cocaine." In other words, levamisole may heighten cocaine's effects—or might be a stimulant all by itself. In the next few weeks, Dr. Clark will begin an experiment of his own to find out (among other things) whether levamisole, without any cocaine, can produce cocainelike effects in lab rats.

• Something about the chemical structure of levamisole retains the iridescent fish-scale sheen of pure cocaine, according to a chemist with ties to the cocaine trade, giving cocaine cut with levamisole the same appearance as pure cocaine.

• Levamisole is a bulking agent for crack. The process of making crack involves "washing" cocaine and filtering out impurities and cutting agents. Levamisole slips through this process, meaning you can produce more volume of crack with less pure cocaine.

• Levamisole passes the "bleach test," a simple street test used to detect impurities in cocaine. When dropped in Clorox, pure cocaine dissolves clearly. Procaine (a common cutting agent) turns reddish brown, lidocaine turns yellowish, and other impurities float to the bottom. In a lab test conducted by ­Dr. Clark, levamisole stayed clean and clear.

One flight from Guyana into New York's JFK airport contained 192 churros stuffed with levamisole-tainted cocaine.

DEA agents in Bogotá came across a magazine page coated in a "protective" plastic laminate that was 21.5 percent cocaine, cut with levamisole.

One thing that can be done: develop an inexpensive field-test kit to try to detect levamisole. Dr. Clark has invented such a kit and—in association with The Stranger, a few folks in the local harm-reduction community, and the People's Harm Reduction Alliance (PHRA), which runs the U-District needle exchange—hopes to begin distributing kits in a few weeks. Unfortunately, kits are technically drug paraphernalia under Washington State law, not only because the kits will contain cocaine residue, but because it is illegal for any person to possess something used to "process, prepare, test, analyze, pack, repack, store, contain, conceal, inject, ingest, inhale, or otherwise introduce into the human body a controlled substance." It's a perfect example of how drug prohibition laws make drugs more dangerous—an unregulated market for cocaine, with no quality control, has encouraged the use of levamisole as a cutting agent. And U.S. drug laws make it illegal for users to test their cocaine for poison—if users could, they might stop buying from dealers who sell tainted cocaine, putting economic pressure on the market to be less dangerous. It's a classically self-defeating chain of policies, but some antidrug warriors defend it on the grounds that since drugs are illegal, users get what they deserve.

Unfortunately, kits are technically drug paraphernalia under Washington State law, not only because the kits will contain cocaine residue, but because it is illegal for any person to possess something used to "process, prepare, test, analyze, pack, repack, store, contain, conceal, inject, ingest, inhale, or otherwise introduce into the human body a controlled substance."

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