They look like cast members in a bad living-dead movie.
They are the tranq-ers, the zombies—victims of the latest synthetic craze in brain-scrambling madness. Xylazine, a super-powerful horse tranquilizer often found mixed with fentanyl—itself 50 times stronger than heroin—is usually taken in needle doses by our drugged-out brethren, souls now seemingly lost forever.
Xylazine is called the flesh-eating drug, because that’s what it does: It literally eats your flesh. Sores, open suppurating sores, develop and they do not heal. Eventually, through infection, they force amputation. Missing fingers, missing toes—even arms and legs—like a slow-motion suicide, are eaten away, from the inside, a bit at a time.
“We thought things were bad with fentanyl, but this is even worse.”
Fentanyl or heroin addicts are finding it harder and harder to score their drug of choice these days without it being contaminated with xylazine. As one addiction specialist put it: “Laced pills have become the leading cause of death among people 18 to 40. We should get the word out.”
Xylazine is deadly, but no one knows quite how deadly, since hospitals and laboratories usually don’t test for it with overdose victims. What authorities know is that the use of tranq, its street name, is rapidly increasing. It can result in everything from hypertension to reduced heart rate, respiratory depression, coma and death. Those who inject xylazine commonly develop necrotic tissue leading to amputation.
If we want a population of brain-scrambled, one-armed junkies, xylazine is the very drug that will give it to us, if we don’t stop it in its tracks now.
Between 2020 and 2021, xylazine deaths in the South jumped by 1,127 percent. Naloxone, the emergency treatment usually given for an opioid overdose, doesn’t work on xylazine.
Xylazine has contributed to a 275 percent jump in overdose deaths between 2019 and 2022 across the United States.
But finally—starting in the United Kingdom—the world is waking up, getting serious and beginning to do something about the dangers of synthetic drugs.
Britain just listed xylazine among 22 banned drugs, with penalties of up to 14 years in prison for anyone dealing it and a two-year sentence for anyone possessing the drug.
“One of this new government’s central missions is to make our streets safer, and we will not accept the use of substances that put lives at risk and allow drug gangs to profit from exploiting vulnerable people,” Minister of State for Crime, Policing and Fire Diana Johnson said.
“We have seen what has happened in other countries when the use of these drugs is allowed to grow out of control, and this is why we are among the first countries to take action.… The criminals who produce, distribute and profit from these drugs will therefore face the full force of the law, and the changes being introduced this week will also make it easier to crack down on those suppliers who are trying to circumvent our controls.”
In 2023, the US launched the Global Coalition to Address Synthetic Drug Threats. The coalition is a group of nearly 160 nations and 15 international organizations banding together to battle the growing threat synthetics pose.
“It’s a very frightening thing,” Dr. Barbara Schindler of Drexel University College of Medicine in Pennsylvania said. “We thought things were bad with fentanyl, but this is even worse.
“We’re seeing hospital beds filled with patients with necrosis (those with severe skin cell death) and amputations because wounds don’t heal and patients’ physical systems shut down. It’s very scary stuff and people don’t know they’re using it because it’s mixed in with other drugs.”
The UK, stepping up its enforcement efforts, seized a staggering 119 tons of illegal drugs with a street value of $3.5 billion in a single 12-month period. The haul represents a 52 percent increase over the drug quantity seized the previous year.
“These statistics send a clear message to organized criminal gangs that they will be caught … if they try to smuggle drugs into our country,” Migration Minister Seema Malhotra said.
The UK’s new law also covers a generic version of nitazenes, potent synthetic opioids, to ensure that regulations encompass illegal drug manufacturers who try to “tweak” drug formulas in order to evade the law.
Xylazine is not yet a controlled substance in the US, but in 2023, the White House announced it would “explore” the matter.
“Explore?” We need more than that—we need the kind of action the UK took, and we need it now.
The DEA has noted that xylazine can be purchased online from Chinese suppliers for $6 to $20 per kilogram, making it cheaper than fentanyl, enabling drug dealers to use it for increased profits.
While we’ve allowed England to take the lead in this battle against synthetic drugs, take one look at the brain-dead zombies shuffling around and you know the US must quickly do something about the epidemic of illegal drug use.
If we want to be leaders in the world, we must step up and stop this scourge. We have no more time to waste.
For many hopeless tranq addicts, it’s already too late.
