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ABC: Cocaine Laced With Veterinary Drug Levamisole Eats Away at Flesh


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Cocaine Laced With Veterinary Drug Levamisole Eats Away at Flesh

Cocaine cut with the veterinary drug levamisole could be the culprit in a flurry of flesh-eating disease in New York and Los Angeles.

The drug, used to deworm cattle, pigs and sheep, can rot the skin off noses, ears and cheeks. And over 80 percent of the country's coke supply contains it.

"It's probably quite a big problem, and we just don't know yet how big a problem it really is," said Dr. Noah Craft, a dermatologist with Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute.

In a case study in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, Craft describes six cocaine users recently plagued by the dark purple patches of dying flesh. And while they happened to hail from the country's coastlines, the problem is national.

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"It's important for people to know it's not just in New York and L.A. It's in the cocaine supply of the entire U.S.," Craft said.

Craft is one of several doctors across the country who have linked the rotting skin to tainted coke. The gruesome wounds surface days after a hit because of an immune reaction that attacks the blood vessels supplying the skin. Without blood, the skin starves and suffocates.

Eighty-two percent of seized cocaine contains levamisole, according to an April 2011 report by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

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I don't know man. Without reading into it much, it scares me, by the mere fact that they call it a "disease" not a side effect. Does this mean it can be passed on from human to human ?

Who the **** knows anymore. Nowadays doing the drugs in the first place is a disease, drinking is a disease, gambling is a disease, eating fast food is a disease, being fat is a disease, liking sex is a disease....I don't trust a single damn thing I hear from the media/government on health/drug matters anymore, they've proven too many times that they are untrustworthy and almost always have ulterior motives.

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I don't know man. Without reading into it much, it scares me, by the mere fact that they call it a "disease" not a side effect. Does this mean it can be passed on from human to human ?

It's not an infectious disease, which is what you would need to be concerned about if you aren't a user. The drug just triggers an aggressive autoimmune response that leads to tissue death.

Who the **** knows anymore. Nowadays doing the drugs in the first place is a disease, drinking is a disease, gambling is a disease, eating fast food is a disease, being fat is a disease, liking sex is a disease....I don't trust a single damn thing I hear from the media/government on health/drug matters anymore, they've proven too many times that they are untrustworthy and almost always have ulterior motives.

Disease isn't a very specific term in and of itself (seriously, it's dis-ease), so you kind of have to keep in mind the context in which it's thrown around. That said, none of the things you listed are actually considered diseases. Addiction to any of those things can be termed a disease... although disorder may be a somewhat easier term to swallow because that doesn't connote as strongly to pathogens. Basically, words are completely arbitrary and semantics suck.

I might also argue that much of the bad information you see on health/drug matters is less about ulterior motives than it is people honestly not knowing as much about human health as they'd like to pretend to.

Hemlock-laced coke for the win!

I'm in a cynical mood today.

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  • 1 month later...

Apparently Scientific American is a couple of months behind the times:

Cocaine's Newest Risks: Dying Skin and Compromised Immunity

A new drug contaminant is causing frightening outbreaks of blackened skin and low white blood cell counts

To the list of cocaine’s many dangers, health officials have added at least one more: purpura, a rash caused by internal bleeding from small blood vessels. Two recent papers in major medical journals have documented cases of cocaine users showing up in emergency rooms with patches of blackened, dying skin on the ears, face, trunk or extremities. The condition causes scarring and sometimes requires reconstructive surgery. Noah Craft, a dermatologist at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center who co-authored a paper on the condition published online by the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology in June, says he now sees about one case per month: “It’s become almost routine.”

The cause of the outbreak is a veterinary deworming medication that has become the most common ingredient used to dilute, or cut, cocaine coming into the U.S. from South America. The drug, called levamisole, was once approved for cancer treatment but was later pulled because of its side effects. Three quarters of the cocaine bricks seized by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration now contain levamisole.

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