Gruesome Photos Reveal Horrors of ‘Zombie’ Drug Fentanyl Additive

“In our experience, a small wound can heal with cessation of injection, cleaning of the wound and supportive wound care,” stopping cymbalta the doctors said. “Even small wounds though can take several weeks to heal and can leave significant scars.”

Jail for ‘reckless’ lorry driver over drugs limit

The FBI repeated that Crooks appeared to act alone during the agency’s briefing to Congress on Wednesday. Director Wray also said there’s no known foreign nexus, in response to a question from Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) in reference to recent reporting about an unrelated Iranian assassination plot targeting Trump, PunchBowl News reported. Sources told the Washington Post that both Crooks’ parents have health issues and appeared to investigators as loving parents who may not have been closely attuned to their son’s activities. In a call with reporters Sunday night, the FBI special agent in charge, Kevin Rojek, said there was “no indication of any mental health issues” regarding the shooter. Trump’s first term led to the fall of Roe v. Wade — so I decided to dig deeper into Project 2025 and find out exactly what the plan has to say about contraception and abortion. Stay up-to-date on the biggest health and wellness news with our weekly recap.

Skin ulcers

1. Unlike marijuana, whose basic makeup is generally similar no matter where the plant is grown, the compounds in a batch of spice can be very different from one day to the next, even if you buy the drug from the same place, he said.
2. After Crooks was killed, multiple news outlets have reported, a photo emerged of a law enforcement officer standing above his body.
3. “Users of spice or K2 don’t really know what chemicals they are getting,” D’Souza said.
4. The US government has called it “an emerging threat” because of its growing role in fatal overdoses across the country – about 7% of the total.
5. When police in Florida pulled a 19-year-old student away from the bodies of his two alleged victims – one of whom he had reportedly bitten in the face – they knew what to blame.

A person who encountered Crooks at CCAC but who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly told NPR that Crooks was known as a brilliant student with a solid future ahead of him. There were plans for Crooks to attend a four-year institution in the state after graduating CCAC, this person said. “From background I’ve gotten from people that I know that have gone to school with him, he was your typical average kid — more on the quiet side, relatively intelligent,” Allegheny County Councilor Dan Grzybek told WESA, Pittsburgh’s NPR news station.

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But the herbal blends, which may resemble potpourri, “can make people do what they normally would not do either to themselves or to others,” Scalzo said. When individuals use drugs contaminated with xylazine, they seem heavily sedated or unconscious, with droopy eyelids and a vacant gaze. Their movements and speech are slow and uncoordinated, and the person appears in a trance. The drug’s effects on the central nervous system may cause poor balance and coordination, making users stagger or stumble.

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Sometimes naloxone or nalmefene isn’t given to fentanyl/xylazine patients because their symptoms are confusing or patients deny using opioids. Also, routine toxicological screening is not performed for xylazine, making intoxication with it difficult to detect and manage. The Biden administration has also announced plans to disrupt the supply of both fentanyl and xylazine into the country. The precursor products come from China and are mostly converted to tablet or powder form by cartels in Mexico as Sky News exposed earlier this year. The drug, an animal tranquillizer, is increasingly mixed or “cut” by drug dealers into supplies of fentanyl which itself is already killing over 100,000 Americans every year. When combined with opioids, which are also nervous system depressants, the risk of a deadly overdose is increased.

Xylazine is most prevalent in Northeastern cities in the U.S. but it has been identified in illicit drug supplies in 48 states. And in Philadelphia, for example, xylazine was found in more than 90 percent of illicit drug samples tested in 2021, O’Neil and Kovach said. He appeared to also have an interest in guns, having joined a shooting club just a short drive away from Bethel Park. Robert S. Bootay III, legal counsel for Clairton Sportsmen’s Club, said in a statement that Crooks was a member of the gun club.

And because xylazine is a sedative and not an opioid, overdose reversal medications like narcan don’t address the drug’s major risks, which include dangerously lowering users’ blood pressure, heart rates and respirations. Those who ingest tranq as part of a fentanyl dose often lapse into hourslong blackouts; by the time they rouse themselves, the effects of the high have worn off, and the desperation for a new dose begins. The CDC still recommends the use of narcan in suspected intoxications involving xylazine, because it’s so often combined with opioids like fentanyl and heroin.

Zagorski thinks it seems unlikely that the wounds are behaviorally driven, as there are black areas of dead tissue at places like users’ fingers and toes, again suggesting it could have to do with poor blood flow. It’s often called an adulterant because it’s added with intentionality—it doesn’t just carry the fentanyl, it adds potentially appealing psychoactive properties. “It’s basically sought to increase the overall euphoria or high that’s experienced with fentanyl,” says Kim Janda, a professor in chemistry and immunology at Scripps Research Institute in California.

In Broward County, Florida, some 60 people died by the end of 2015 – only 14 months after the drug began taking its hold on the area. Police target properties in Selby and Goole, finding suspected class A drugs and cash. “The drug is not included in standard drug screens in the UK, so we don’t know how widespread the xylazine problem is,” said Dr Caroline Copeland, King’s College London lecturer and director of the National Programme on Substance Abuse Deaths. An examination of his body detected heroin, fentanyl and cocaine in his system, as well as xylazine.

A law enforcement official told CNN Monday that on the morning of the Trump campaign rally, Crooks purchased a five-foot ladder and 50 rounds of ammunition before driving to Butler. The city reported that 90% of lab-tested dope samples from 2021 contained xylazine, which can increase the risk of overdose when combined with other illicit substances. Xylazine causes sedative-like symptoms, such as excessive sleepiness and respiratory depression, as well as raw wounds that can become severe and spread rapidly with repeated exposure. The crusty ulcerations, which can become dead skin called eschar, can result in amputation if left untreated. While approved by the Food and Drug Administration for veterinary use, xylazine, a non-opioid, is not safe for humans, and those who overdose on the drug do not respond to naloxone, or Narcan, the most common overdose reversal treatment. According to the National Institute of Health (NIH), it can cause drowsiness and amnesia and slow breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure to dangerously low levels.

Although Pennsylvania, and especially Philadelphia, is ground zero, dramatic increases in fentanyl/xylazine overdose are found throughout the U.S. As fentanyl’s effects normally begin to wear off and withdrawal would otherwise begin, xylazine instead is still active, causing sedation. The user may already be in withdrawal but is so sedated from the xylazine that they are not even aware of it.

Crooks reportedly also looked up dates of Trump’s public appearances and the upcoming Democratic National Convention. “Stop promoting or approving mail-order abortions in violation of long-standing federal laws that prohibit the mailing and interstate carriage of abortion drugs.” In the name of science, Dr. Nico Dosenbach had scanned his own brain dozens of times. But this was the first time he’d taken a mind-bending substance before sliding into the MRI tunnel. Because it is not listed as a controlled substance for animals or humans, “tranq” lands in a confusing and horrifying gray area — and hospitals rarely test for it with routine toxicology screenings.

An additional issue is that people who are overdosing from xylazine do not respond to Narcan, also known as naloxone, which can usually be used to revive a user from an overdose of opioids. Xylazine, the “zombie drug,” has fully asserted its presence in Kensington, just as it has elsewhere across Philadelphia, the Northeast corridor, and, increasingly, other sectors of the U.S. James Sherman sees the telltale signs every day in his job as the director of men’s programs at Savage Sisters Recovery center, in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. Some of the drug users arrive there in a stupor, some unable to stay awake, some with open sores or wounds on their hands, arms, legs, heads. In terms of treatment, Janda is currently working on a vaccine to block xylazine’s sleep-inducing effects. Janda and his team recently published a paper suggesting that their vaccine could reverse xylazine-induced behavior in mice, and are hoping to replicate findings in humans.

“Facilities decline patients because of their wounds, which leads to a bigger treatment gap and progression of wounds because of that barrier of waiting for a bed somewhere where someone can handle your wound problem,” says Perrone. If wounds are left untreated, it can lead to infection and further problems down the line. Here, we break down ecstasy mdma: uses effects risks what’s happening, the main concerns that experts have about its prevalence, and why they say this scary-sounding drug isn’t the main thing they’re worried about. O’Neil and Kovach said they had worked with several people who had successful healing of their wounds, including those with large, deep wounds requiring extensive surgeries.

The video clips that started surfacing on the internet last year shows people on the streets unable to stand upright or walk properly, and moving sluggishly. When police in Florida pulled a 19-year-old student away from the bodies of his two alleged victims – one of whom he had reportedly bitten in the face – they knew what to blame. Calls to make it a criminal offence to take over a person’s home and use it for unlawful activities. If injected directly into someone’s bloodstream, it can cause large open skin ulcers to form. It is “alarming” to find it in “even a few” illicit e-cigarettes that many think are pretty harmless, experts say.

It will take a concerted effort to bring forth more testing capable of identifying xylazine’s prevalence in drugs, especially cheap street drugs. The New York Times recently noted that the drug-checking machines capable of identifying a substance like tranq can run to tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, money that most cash-strapped health departments don’t have. Routine toxicology screens do not detect the drug, and a CDC spokeswoman says there is no commercially available version of a less expensive test strip for it. The rise of xylazine, a common additive to illicit substances like fentanyl, heroin, and cocaine, and a likely contributor to spiking overdose death rates in the U.S., has researchers and government agencies on alert.

The disruptions in brain networks appear to be “where the plasticity effects of psychedelics are coming from,” says Dr. Joshua Siegel, a researcher at Washington University and the study’s lead author. The research also provided a close look at how these drugs temporarily enhance the brain’s ability flakka drug what it is, effects, and nicknames to adapt and change, an ability known as plasticity. Cari Nierenberg has been writing about health and wellness topics for online news outlets and print publications for more than two decades. Her work has been published by Live Science, The Washington Post, WebMD, Scientific American, among others.

Experts don’t fully understand what’s happening in the brain to cause these bizarre behaviors, agreed Dr. Deepak D’Souza, a professor of psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine who has studied the effects of cannabinoids and its links with psychosis for the past 20 years. One possibility is that the drugs lack a compound found in marijuana that may act as a brake, preventing bizarre behaviors. During that initial appearance of tranq on the streets in 2006, health authorities recorded only a handful of overdose deaths in which the drug was present. By 2021, more than a third of all overdose deaths in the city had xylazine detected in their toxicology tests, according to Jennifer Shinefield a field epidemiologist with the city. On its most basic level, tranq is the latest development in the evolution of street drug composition, in part because it’s so easy to get and it’s relatively inexpensive.