This weeks Addiction radio podcast looks at the news of a veterinary drug, levamisole being added to cocaine, causing illness and deaths, and other ways the street makes drug even more dangerous then their natural form. Dr Inaba explains.
CNS: Hi, welcome once again to the addiction radio pod cast from CNS Productions. Im Howard LaMere here with Dr. Darryl Inaba. Darryl, theres a disconcerting story here about cocaine showing up with a dangerous veterinary medicine and I wondered what you thought about that, what you might know about that.
Darryl: Yeah, actually levamisole which is an anathematic – a medicine used to deworm cows, actually when cows pick up parasites like worms. It started appearing in as a cut or an additive to cocaine here on the west coast, actually Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and was causing a lot of concern actually caused a lot of illness as well. A month or so before this, this article broke from the midwest and back east it seems to be appearing now as well and it raised some concern about the authorities in Oregon because they didnt know why anybody would do this and what it was meant to be. They didnt know if it was just merely in more dense cut – sometimes drug traffickers with a chemical like cocaine or a powder like heroin used things to cut it with that are more dense, meaning weigh more from the size that these things are sold be merely by weight so if you bring in something thats cut with something that weighs heavier you get a better price for the same amount of drug that you put into them. But as I looked at it, in a response in the mail I got for the state of Oregon it, it appeared that again, this street or traffickers, manufacturers, probably as it was coming up from South America began to look at ways of altering street drugs and, and maybe putting cuts in it that would add to the effects of the drug or, make it more potent or make it less toxic or whatever and as it turns out levamisole this anti worming drug actually releases some dopamine – that same reward reinforcement chemical that cocaine releases to make you feel good – so maybe this is an attempt to, or somebody thought, boy this felt good when they accidentally exposed themselves to levamisole mixed with cocaine in South America or something and decided to add it to the cocaine theyre trafficking. The problem is that levamisole is fairly toxic, it can affect blood cells, it can affect a variety of medical problems and now there are stories not only where dozens of several sickened by it but there were actual three deaths that occur to this combination. So it seems to me this will be a quick end to this product being added to cocaine unless some cocaine dealer was trying to kill you. I mean why would you want to kill off your customers? You want something to actually make them want the cocaine more but not to kill them off, so
CNS: But if theyre actually doing it in Columbia and other areas where it grows then
Darryl: This has happened before you know, street drugs continue to be adulterated and misrepresented, diluted with things that arent very healthy but not intentionally theyre done so to either make it more, make more money on it or make the drug more potent or have less side effects, what ever they do and theyre not, theyre not pharmaceutical manufacturer firms, they dont have any testing requirements, they dont have any kind of pretrial tests with it so they dont know whats going to happen, they dont know whats it all about. I remember when street chemists were trying to manufacture Demerol, that opium narcotic here and they ended up creating a chemical as an adulterant to their manufacturing product process that resulted in creating a, or causing Parkinsonism in a lot of people that were taking it or most the people were exposed to it and thats a horrible, horrible thing to happen; they had end states Parkinson overnight due to MPTP that was an adulterant left over in the manufacturer process and everything got snuffed out very quickly because again you dont want your customers to be, to want more of your product you dont want them to die off or be too sick to use it.
CNS: Right
Darryl: Then when other chemists said well why dont we just make fentanyl maybe thats going to be safer, thats not going to cause the Parkinsonism side effect and its so much more potent than heroin or morphine that you just have to make a little bit of it and dilute it real well and sell it off to people and make tons of money. Well, they knew that if they made fentanyl they would be breaking the control substance abuse act and so they went to making street derivatives, alpha-methyl, thiofentanyl, sufentanyl, a bunch of different derivatives and of course they didnt test it out and they had no way of knowing that although fentanyl is like a hundred times stronger than morphine they knew alternative isomer products the sufentanyl, the thiofentanyl, the alpha-methoxyfentanyl, turned out to be a thousand times, six thousand times, one, one of them was I think twenty thousand times stronger than morphine. So when they sold it off as heroin they had people just dying all over the country with it and they had to quit that right a way because again theyre losing good customers.
CNS: Where does it go, where does it lead?
Darryl: Yeah, I think its not the end of it. Were going to continue to see people trying to put additives or finding new drugs. A recent story we did about ephrins, the AIDS drug, people learning in South Africa to, instead of taking it for their AIDS, just smoking it to get off on it. I mean those things are just amazing to me that people are always searching for a buzz and theyre always going and theyre going to find them and however they find them through toxic substances or natural or synthetic substances and whether or not theyre going to be toxic or not. It doesnt seem to matter, theyre interested in finding a new buzz more than theyre interested in health.
CNS: Yeah, hopefully you dont die along the way. You know somewhere here theres a story here about oxycontin, which of course is a derivative another derivative of morphine and all the things that people go through to over ride the safety precautions that are built in.
Darryl: Well, you know, thats an interesting combination of stories because here with oxycontin we have the pharmaceutical industry themselves trying to modify or change a medication and trying to prevent it from being abused so they altered it – they, they took a schedule two controlled substance which was actually sold off as Percodan and there, and a long time when in1970 when they were first developed was known to be heavily addicted and so scheduled two and they reformulated into little pellets with oxycontin that created a time release of the chemical so that you wouldnt get a big bolus of the oxycodone just by taking it and they thought that would prevent it from being abused and they sold the government on it. I know that they had to have intelligence if you will or they had to ask people to say you know will this be a decent modification then to prevent oxycontin from being abused and I know they must have gotten input from various people you know the streets too smart for that kind stuff. The street is going to figure out how to deal with this an they went ahead the government approved it, so they went on a big oxycontin sales campaign, they sold a tons of it for the safer non addictive opiate for chronic pain condition and within only I think a matter of weeks or months the street figured out hey you just take these tablets or capsules and smash up all the things that are in them and therefore you smash up that protective coating, you can inject it, you can snort it, and you can get that rush of you know some of these products, the original percodan only contained like five milligrams of oxycodone or ten milligrams. Some of these contain eighty to hundred, over a hundred milligrams of oxycodone, but it was safe because it was wrapped up in these coatings but what they did was by crushing it, even just chewing on it, you can just chew it as you go down. They, they eliminated that protection and so we have now a mass number of oxycontin deaths, a lot of oxycontin abuse situations, and the same thing that you would see on the street, trying to manipulate drugs and stuff to make them either safer or potent they just create more problems. Its interesting because the pharmaceutical industry isnt giving up on this, the last few conferences of American Society of Addiction Medicine many pharmaceutical companies were there presenting that they have all kinds of ways of making a very addictive opiate thats used for pain, say morphine even or oxycodone or hydrocodone that all are being abused. They said weve got a way of making this so that its not going to be abused and one of the renditions that had been recently released that they took a tablet of oxycodone and they didnt take a tablet of oxycodone they took a tablet of naltrexone, a narcotic antagonist, orally active narcotic antagonist. If you take this by mouth naltrexone, then you have any opiates in your system its going to block them out and they compressed that tablet to a very compressed cork or compressed powder that if somebody took that orally it, its so compressed that it will just go through your whole system, just come right out and as you go to the bathroom come through you without being absorbed and therefore wont affect your head and then on top of that they sprayed the morphine or they sprayed oxycontin so that if oxycodone so that if somebody wanted to abuse it for its release by crushing it they, they had the protective coating, they sprayed it on the naltrexone and if somebody took that tablet, chewed it, or they smashed it down to get all the morphine or oxycodone in it released from that protective coating what they would do is also smash up the naltrexone and therefore end up with a blocker in their head and get nothing out of that process. Well you know Im sure the streets are going to figure out, actually I could figure it out in a second but, but we dont want to add to probably on the street but its very clear to me what youve got to do in order to make that opiate available from that compressed tablet. Then there are a lot of other techniques being showcased and pharmaceutical companies are always looking to come up with some way of getting around abuse of these things but when theres just too much desire from street users, they always seem to find a way.
CNS: It is true we always do, being the clever critters that we are, always figure a way around it. Well well come back to this again Im sure as the pharmaceutical world and the street world continue to make new news. If you have any comments or questions that you would like to pose to us wed be very happy to hear them. Stop by our website which is cnsproductions.com, drop us an email, and if its a question well try to get to it on a future program, and if its a comment wed love to hear them. Darryl thank you very much.
Darryl: Hey thanks Howard, always great talking to you.
CNS: Talk to you soon, bye. That wraps our pod for today. Thanks for visiting the CNS pod cast. Please check back soon for the next in the series and visit our website www.cnsproductions.com.