![]() ![]() “Things get added to it and cause a horrific-looking scariness,” said Boyer, an emergency medicine physician and medical toxicologist. ![]() Ed Boyer, considering it’s unclear what is in people’s drugs to begin with. It’s not understood why xylazine is causing the tissue wounds, which are not always found at injection sites and develop even among people who smoke the drug. Xylazine can do major damage to the human body, including leaving drug users with severe skin ulcers, soft-tissue wounds and necrosis – sometimes described as rotting skin - that can lead to amputation. It is approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for use as a tranquilizer in veterinary medicine, typically in horses, but it is not approved for use in humans. One hypothesis as to why xylazine may be added is that it may extend the duration of the high the drug provides, but experts also said it may just be used as a bulking agent to boost a seller’s supply. Fentanyl, which has been driving the opioid crisis in recent years, is a fast-acting opioid. That makes toxicology reports that include all detected drugs a critically important supplement to death certificate data, according to the CDC researchers. With an emerging drug such as xylazine, medical examiners and coroners might have differing opinions on the role it plays in causing an overdose death or they might not be familiar with it at all. However, even more consistent testing for xylazine is necessary to grasp the true scale of the issue going forward, they wrote. The researchers note that reporting practices have varied over time and by jurisdiction and increased prevalence could partially reflect greater awareness and testing. The data, published Thursday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is from a subset of states that participated in the CDC’s State Unintentional Drug Overdose Reporting System. In June 2022, xylazine was present in nearly 11% of fentanyl overdose deaths, almost a four-fold increase from January 2019, when the combination was present in about 3% of cases, according to the report. The Biden administration recently declared fentanyl laced with xylazine – an animal sedative commonly known as “tranq” – to be an emerging threat facing the United States, and a new analysis of toxicology reports illustrates its sharp rise. ![]()
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