Heather Yakin: Cocaine making comeback with new, lethal forms – News – recordonline.com

Here’s the opposite of a fun fact: As opioid deaths continue to rise, and as fentanyl gains ground as the most common drug involved in fatal overdoses, cocaine is making a comeback.

Availability, use and deaths from cocaine have hit their highest level since 2007, according to the Centers for Disease Control and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Adding to that, officials say, it’s more and more common to find cocaine laced with fentanyl and other toxic adulterants. Much like opioid dealers, cocaine dealers are more concerned about profits than their customers’ health. After all, if a user dies, everyone else knows the product is strong.

These new, lethal forms of cocaine are one topic at the upcoming 2019 National Rx Drug Abuse & Heroin Summit, sponsored by the National Conference on Addiction Disorders. The April 22-25 conference in Atlanta, Ga., will also discuss updates on the latest issues in addiction prevention, emerging law enforcement and treatment issues.

In addition to fentanyl, officials say, labs are finding more and more cocaine laced with an animal worming medication, levamisole. According to a MedPage Today article, levamisole was pulled from the market for human use in the U.S. in 2000 due to its association with severe vasculitis.

“In recent years levamisole has been detected in 70% to 85% of cocaine lots and in up to 88% of urine samples from cocaine users in Europe and the U.S.,” the Aug. 5, 2018 article notes, citing studies that indicate that levamisole makes cocaine production cheaper. The symptoms of the worming drug’s effects included skin lesions, particularly on the face and ears, lesions in the mouth or throat, and occasional bleeding in the lungs.

While that study focused on 179 cases found in medical literature, the MedPage article says, three of those patients died: one from an overdose, one from cerebral hemorrhage, one from something called necrotizing pneumonia.

So in light of this, it’s probably not surprising that another session of the upcoming addiction summit is called “The Second Tsunami,” and focuses on “a second wave of stimulant overdoses,” describing it as a wave that “is just starting to break.”

It’s been a year since Port Jervis police Chief William Worden observed that some drug users were switching to cocaine and/or crack because they believed it was “safer” than heroin or other opioids.

Not a bit of this stuff is safe. There is zero quality control on the streets. And a dealer is thinking about his bottom line, not a user’s well-being.

Another trend emerging out of the opioid crisis, given the progression of so many users to injecting heroin (or whatever is being sold as heroin), is the spread of infection related to opioids. In particular, some states are seeing a rise in hepatitis A and C infections, particularly among people who are homeless and inject drugs. Indiana saw an outbreak of HIV in 2015 related to injecting street drugs.

And a study of 100 hospitals in North Carolina found a 13-fold rise in hospitalization and valve surgery for drug-use-related endocarditis, an infection of the surface of the heart, from 2007-2017.

Again: None of this is safe.

If you’re using, the only safe thing is the hard thing: Get yourself into treatment.

hyakin@th-record.com

On Twitter @HeatherYakin845