Nearly half of street drugs are laced with the deadly sedative “xylazine,” which most Americans have never heard of, analysis shows

Nearly half of street drugs in the US are laced with a dangerous animal tranquilizer, according to a study.

More than 40 percent of the samples tested in Rhode Island contained xylasin, which health officials say can cause “serious and life-threatening side effects.”

Xylazine, also known as “Tranq”, is commonly used in veterinary medicine as a sedative or pain reliever for cows and horses.

It became popular for recreation in Puerto Rico and originated in Philadelphia in the early 2010s, but it is now popping up in other places as well.

In November, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned health professionals that the drug is being used as an adulterant in heroin, meth, cocaine and opioids to enhance their effects and increase supply.

For their analysis, Brown University researchers analyzed 90 drug samples from the Toxicology and Ethnographic Drug Surveillance Testing Program.

Although none of the drugs were marketed as xylasin, 40 contained the animal tranquilizer – mostly fentanyl.

While the drug is widely available in Rhode Island, researchers there say most users and community workers don’t even know what xylazine is.

The FDA warned healthcare professionals that it “can be difficult to distinguish between a xylazine overdose and an opioid overdose” — both drugs that lead to incipient lung failure.

But unlike opioids, xyxine overdose cannot be controlled with naloxone, the opioid overdose reversal drug. Another concern is that people can also become physically dependent on the drug.

This creates complications for addicts who want to start using a drug used to treat opioid use disorders, such as methadone.

If someone stops taking fentanyl as part of this process, they will also experience xylasin withdrawal symptoms.

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Patients who take drugs contaminated with xylasin can also develop stomach ulcers and ulcers that “take a long time to heal,” Chelsea Shover, an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, told ABC.

Xylazine was implicated in up to 20 percent of drug overdose deaths last year in hard-hit states including Massachusetts, Connecticut, Illinois and Pennsylvania.

It was sold under the brand name Rompun in the US and first became popular in the 2000s in Puerto Rico, where it is known as “anestecia de caballo”.

It has become a common form of counterfeit heroin, a cheap way for drug dealers to improve the drug’s absorption and increase its potency.

In Puerto Rico, xylazine is most often found in a drug combination nicknamed “speedball,” which consists of heroin and cocaine and is used to balance the effects of both the downer and the upper.

A 2008 study found that more than 90 percent of the syringes used for tested Puerto Rico fastballs contained xylasin.

Public health officials were alerted in part because of the appearance of sores on the skin of users where they injected the drug.

The painful lesions are often exacerbated when users repeatedly inject in the same place, hoping to benefit from the opioid’s pain-relieving effects.

The drug has left a stain on Philadelphia, home to the East Coast’s largest open-air heroin market.

Between 2010 and 2015, xylazine was detected in 40 of Philly’s 1,854 accidental overdose deaths (just two percent) with evidence of heroin and/or fentanyl.

Xylazine’s presence in Philadelphia has increased dramatically since then.

It was detected in 10 percent of fentanyl and/or heroin overdose deaths in 2017, 18 percent in 2018 and 31 percent in 2019.

In 2020, xylazine was present in nearly 26 percent of overdose deaths in Philadelphia, followed by about 19 percent in Maryland and 10 percent in Connecticut.