“Lo ha empeorado todo para todo el mundo”: Filadelfia enfrenta el auge de una nueva droga callejera

El aumento del uso de medetomidina pone de relieve cómo la prohibición incrementa los riesgos, sobrecarga los sistemas de salud y subraya la necesidad urgente de un suministro seguro y de ampliar la reducción de daños. Más información, en inglés, está disponible abajo.

The staff at the harm reduction hub Sunshine House in the middle of Kensington, a neighborhood in north-east Philadelphia home to the most notorious open drug scene in the US, often reverse at least one overdose a day.

But the mutating illegal drug supply is regularly conjuring new drugs with novel sets of potentially deadly risks. For the past 18 months, there has been a new drug in circulation, the veterinary sedative medetomidine, also known as “rhino tranq”. It has perhaps the most extreme and fast-acting withdrawal symptoms of all known street drugs.

Even as open drug scenes go, the vibe in Kensington is particularly bleak. Dozens of people line the main thoroughfare folded forward at the waist in unresponsive stupors from the effects of the drugs.

Dealers stand on the corner of every block, sometimes offering free samples. Members of religious group the Black Hebrew Israelites sometimes proselytize at the intersection wearing golden robes and claiming the use of cannabis is “against God”. They don’t seem to have got the memo that medetomidine-adulterated fentanyl has been the predominant form of “dope” in circulation since the beginning of the year.

“It’s made things worse for everyone – not only the people who use it but for the doctors too,” says Roz Pichardo, the founder of Sunshine House, where people who use drugs can access support. “No one knows how it works.” Well-known locally, Pichardo says she has personally reversed more than 3,000 overdoses since the busy hub opened in 2018.

But medetomidine complicates matters because people remain unconscious after the fentanyl overdose has been reversed. “It’s causing havoc on people’s organs,” Pichardo says of the medetomidine, which is causing even younger people to experience organ failure. “Narcan works wonders, but it doesn’t fix organs.”