It’s already laying waste to cities in the US, rotting the flesh of drug users – and now it has its terrible claws firmly embedded in Britain.
An appallingly destructive street drug and tranquiliser called xylazine – also known as ‘tranq’ and the ‘zombie drug’ – has killed 11 people in the UK and has ‘penetrated’ the country’s illegal drugs market.
That is the terrifying conclusion of a new study by King’s College London on the relentless spread into Europe of a drug usually used to sedate large animals.
Tranq is so powerful it can knock out an elephant so its effect on humans is inevitably extreme. Their heads drooping and eyes glazed, users sit or stand motionless for hours in a semi-conscious state known as ‘nodding out’.
Being a respiratory depressant, xylazine also causes a user’s breathing, heart rate and blood pressure to plummet to dangerously low levels. Taking it with opioids increases the chance of a potentially lethal overdose. A tiny amount can be fatal.
And its potency also causes horrific skin abscesses and ulcers — wounds that won’t heal and frequently become infected.
Xylazine depresses the central nervous system, causing users, such as these in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, to exhibit a zombie-like appearance
As the drug spreads beyond the cities to suburbs and small towns, tranq has taken hold in urban addiction epicentres such as Philadelphia’s Kensington district (pictured)
The resulting necrosis — rotting of infected tissue — leaves festering wounds like chemical burns that must be amputated.
Xylazine was identified on 35 occasions across UK toxicology labs, drug-testing facilities and through drug seizures between May 2022 and August 2023.
The labs found xylazine in 16 people during this period, of which 11 died.
It isn’t the first time the drug has been identified in Britain. The study’s senior author and director of the UK’s National Programme on Substance Abuse Deaths, Caroline Copeland, told the Mail last year that the death of xylazine’s first UK victim, 43-year-old Solihull factory worker Karl Warburton, ‘could be the tiniest tip of a growing iceberg’.
Few people take tranq by choice and Mr Warburton is believed to have accidentally consumed xylazine after taking heroin laced with it. Unscrupulous dealers use it because it’s so cost-effective – often it is mixed into heroin or the powerful synthetic opiate fentanyl to intensify and prolong the ‘high’ the drugs produce.
Researchers said the drug had even been found in the UK in cannabis-based vapes and the sleeping drug temazepam, as well as the sedative diazepam and pain reliever codeine phosphate.
Solihull factory worker Karl Warburton, 43, was xylazine’s first UK victim last year
However, as xylazine isn’t included in the routine drug screening conducted by British hospitals and coroners, there could be many more instances in the UK that have so far gone undetected, Ms Copeland said last year. She said xylazine could have a ‘huge impact’ on the UK if drug users and those trying to help them weren’t made aware of the threat it poses.
‘This is not a problem just for the heroin users. This is a problem for a wider population of people who use drugs, who might not think that they’re at risk of xylazine harm,’ she warned this week.
One only need look across the Atlantic to see the possible consequences. A year ago this month, acknowledging that it was being increasingly detected in overdose deaths, the White House took the unprecedented step of declaring xylazine to be an ’emerging drug threat’, a formal designation that has never been used before and which required the US government to coordinate a national response to the drug within 90 days.
As the drug spreads beyond the cities to suburbs and small towns, tranq has taken hold in urban addiction epicentres such as Philadelphia’s Kensington district. Its streets have been taken over by the squalid tents and sleeping bags of shambling opioid addicts shooting up in full view of passers-by.
‘When you start getting sick from the tranq, you start shaking violently, salivating and vomiting,’ one tranq user said
The drug has spread across the country, from Los Angeles (left) to New York City (right), with news crews capturing people hunched over and on the ground
Xylazine is currently sweeping across the US and it is invading Britain too
There, tranq users have described its devastating consequences. ‘When you start getting sick from the tranq, you start shaking violently, salivating and vomiting,’ said addict Devin Bair. ‘You’re pretty much just a mess on the ground.’ Another tranq addict observed that it ‘literally eats your flesh… it’s self-destruction at its finest’.
America’s mass addiction to opioids — drugs similar to heroin and which are either derived from the poppy plant or synthetic morphine — has been well documented. Fentanyl has become the leading cause of death among Americans aged 18 to 45, killing nearly 200 every day.
Tranq – even more powerful, cheaper and easier to source than fentanyl – has only added to this nightmare.
Also known as ‘sleep cut’, it is a common veterinary tranquilliser usually used on horses, cows and wild animals including elephants.
It can be injected as a fluid, or snorted or swallowed in the form of a powder.
Its main physical effect is heavy sedation, a blackout stupor that renders users entirely unresponsive. If they’ve taken it on the street, victims are vulnerable to robbery, violence and rape.
Given that xylazine can also cause amnesia, users may not even remember what happened to them. One US addict said that while ‘you get warm and fuzzy from fentanyl, tranq just puts you to sleep’.
Once hooked, addicts find it very difficult to get off tranq as the withdrawal symptoms, including intense anxiety, migraines and double vision, are so excruciatingly painful.
The drug’s ‘flesh-eating’ properties have baffled experts. The location of the patches of dead and rotting tissue — known as ‘eschar’ — that erupt on the skin bear no relation to where sufferers have injected themselves.
A regular user’s skin will often turn a blue or greyish colour and some scientists believe xylazine may be affecting blood circulation in a way that stops the skin from repairing itself.
Untreated, the gaping wounds fester. Out on the streets, they attract maggots and fleas, and can even open to expose the bone. Amputation is often inevitable but infected areas can also prove fatal.
And while its zombifying effects could have come straight from a horror film, xylazine has another alarming drawback: while various medications, notably a drug called naloxone, have been developed to reverse the effects of an opioid overdose, xylazine is not an opioid and does not respond to them.
The major stumbling block in efforts to combat the drug and halt its devastating spread is that, although it’s not approved for use on humans, xylazine is not yet illegal in the US, making it far easier for drug cartels to obtain a supply.
That also means the government doesn’t monitor it, prompting experts to suspect that it’s far more prevalent than statistics suggest.
While xylazine was first developed in 1962 by German pharmaceutical giant Bayer and is used by vets across the world, including in Britain, addicts didn’t start using it as a heroin substitute until the 2000s.
In 2011, a study on the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico, a US territory, reported that people in farming areas were injecting ‘anestesia de caballo’ (horse anesthesia) and developing severe skin ulcers.
Many US cities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco, now have an area like Kensington (pictured) that has become the grim home of xylazine users
Xylazine’s main physical effect is heavy sedation, a blackout stupor that renders users entirely unresponsive
By then it had already been detected in the Kensington neighbourhood of Philadelphia — a poor area with a large Puerto Rican population — and by 2018 the problem was escalating fast.
Many US cities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco, now have an area like Kensington that has become the grim home of xylazine users.
China is thought to be the main source of the drug, selling xylazine for £5 to £16 per kilogramme, followed by Mexico, Russia and India.
Why has it come to the UK? Drug expert Ms Copeland points out that, historically, the UK’s heroin has largely come from Afghanistan, while America has been supplied by Central and South America.
However, the Taliban has made good on its pledge to destroy the Afghan opium poppy fields, meaning the supply from the country has dried up.
That has not only increased demand for alternative drugs such as fentanyl but also for heroin that comes from other sources, says Ms Copleand. And that means supplies from the US which, unlike Afghan heroin, is routinely tainted with fentanyl and xylazine to cater for a population devastated by addiction to prescription painkillers.
The UK faces a steep learning curve. Even seemingly safe pills — including counterfeit supplies of prescription drugs such as the painkiller Percocet and the stimulant Adderall, used by people with ADHD, are now sometimes laced with xylazine.
In New York, xylazine has been found in 25 per cent of drug samples while in Philadelphia that percentage has risen to an astonishing 90 per cent.
According to The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, US deaths involving xylazine rose from 12 in January 2019 to 188 in June 2022. The study only considered 20 US states, meaning the actual number is likely to be even higher. As Washington – and perhaps now Westminster, too – rushes to deal with the problem, some experts fear that if xylazine is made illegal, it will only encourage drug cartels to find potentially worse alternatives.