{"id":466145,"date":"2025-12-23T07:41:12","date_gmt":"2025-12-23T07:41:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/466145\/"},"modified":"2025-12-23T07:41:12","modified_gmt":"2025-12-23T07:41:12","slug":"its-made-things-worse-for-everyone-philadelphia-grapples-with-rise-of-new-street-drug-philadelphia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/466145\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018It\u2019s made things worse for everyone\u2019: Philadelphia grapples with rise of new street drug | Philadelphia"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

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 \u201crhino tranq\u201d. It has perhaps the most extreme and fast-acting withdrawal symptoms of all known street drugs.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cagainst God\u201d. They don\u2019t seem to have got the memo that medetomidine-adulterated fentanyl has been the predominant form of \u201cdope\u201d in circulation since the beginning of the year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s made things worse for everyone \u2013 not only the people who use it but for the doctors too,\u201d says Roz Pichardo, the founder of Sunshine House, where people who use drugs can access support. \u201cNo one knows how it works.\u201d Well-known locally, Pichardo says she has personally reversed more than 3,000 overdoses since the busy hub opened in 2018.<\/p>\n

But medetomidine complicates matters because people remain unconscious after the fentanyl overdose has been reversed. \u201cIt\u2019s causing havoc on people\u2019s organs,\u201d Pichardo says of the medetomidine, which is causing even younger people to experience organ failure. \u201cNarcan works wonders, but it doesn\u2019t fix organs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chris Simpson, a glazer by trade who specialized in commercial skylights, is a regular visitor to Sunshine House, where people can gather to watch TV, receive clean clothes and stock up on medetomidine testing kits and Narcan, the life-saving opioid overdose reverser.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe cartels figured out a way to make more money this way,\u201d the south Jersey native who is currently street homeless says. \u201cHeroin used to last all day. This shit only lasts for like four hours. The rush is the same but there\u2019s no euphoria.\u201d<\/p>\n

The withdrawal effects are far worse than any other drug, too, he says, following his relapse three months ago after becoming street homeless after years \u201cclean\u201d. \u201cI won\u2019t be able to stop throwing up until it\u2019s only bile,\u201d he says. \u201cMy heart goes crazy, and I get the spins.\u201d<\/p>\n

Others describe excruciating \u201cbrain zaps\u201d and tell of being hospitalized after heart attacks due to the intense withdrawal effects. Pichardo says she knows of up to 20 people who have died over the past year.<\/p>\n

The run-down neighbourhood of Kensington made its name as an epicentre of the heroin trade, with the documentary film-maker Louis Theroux making a popular episode of his Law and Order series here in 2004<\/a> on the continuing gang violence<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Then the \u201cdope\u201d on the street courtesy of the dealers who control the market became predominantly fentanyl, which is much cheaper. By 2021, most \u201cstamps\u201d \u2013 small bags of opioid-based drugs which also contain fentanyl, the potent synthetic opioid which remains the leading cause of fatal overdoses in the country<\/a> \u2013 contained xylazine, an even cheaper veterinary sedative also known as \u201ctranq\u201d, which has no approved medicinal uses.<\/p>\n

After Pennsylvania last year banned xylazine amid a crackdown on the drug, the gangs who control the drug trade replaced it with medetomidine, mostly used as an anaesthetic for dogs but also in intensive care wards (ICUs) to deeply sedate mechanically ventilated patients.<\/p>\n

By the beginning of this year, medetomidine was present<\/a> in about seven in 10 stamps. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, medetomidine is 200 times more potent<\/a> than xylazine, the flesh-destroying drug<\/a> which leaves people with bone-exposing wounds on limbs that many people in Kensington have needed to get amputated.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis shit\u2019s fucked up,\u201d says 33-year-old Earl, who had both his legs removed two years ago and is currently street homeless. \u201cI\u2019m just trying to get by,\u201d he adds, as the metro train rumbles overhead. \u201cThey\u2019re preying on us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Medetomidine does not carry the same risks from intravenous injection as xylazine, one of few plus points on the shifting supply. But detox centers are ill-equipped for the task at hand because pharmaceutical-grade medetomidine can only be prescribed to patients in ICU. The sudden prevalence of the street drug has placed hospitals under significant pressure.<\/p>\n

\u201cTwenty-five per cent of all of our ICUs are occupied by patients in withdrawal some months,\u201d says physician Jeanmarie Perrone from Penn Presbyterian medical center\u2019s emergency room, which equates to about 35 patients a month, with the number of people presenting for withdrawal treatment citywide more than doubling<\/a> since medetomidine was first detected last year.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is always difficult to track the cause of death, partly because hospitals don\u2019t test for medetomidine. I\u2019m not sure that medetomidine is causing more fatalities \u2013 it might be \u2013 but it\u2019s causing a lot more morbidity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tolerance to medetomidine can increase rapidly, too. Perrone has treated some patients who use up to 50 stamps a day. \u201cThere are people with extraordinarily heavy use here that we take care of,\u201d she says. The grave situation facing hospitals is \u201cuniquely bad for several reasons\u201d, Perrone explains. Medetomidine withdrawal \u201cdoesn\u2019t even have a diagnosis code\u201d, she says. \u201cOur rehab centers are still set up for addiction 101. We need rapid innovation.\u201d<\/p>\n

If medetomidine was a national issue it might have attracted more attention, she suggests, with its emergence in Philadelphia appearing to have been the direct result of the state ban \u2013 a measure that went into force in May, just after people who had overdosed on medetomidine started showing up in ERs.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s created a lot more tracking of xylazine, and that\u2019s right when we saw the switch to medetomidine,\u201d says Perrone.<\/p>\n

Overdose deaths are declining rapidly across the US after the surges related to the pharmaceutical industry-driven opioid crisis and the introduction of uber-potent fentanyl to the drug supply over the past decade, before the widespread distribution of Narcan.<\/p>\n

In Philadelphia last year the annual number of overdose deaths fell for the second consecutive year, to 1,045. Preliminary official data suggests this year might record fewer than 1,000 overdose deaths for the first time since 2016 after 469 fatalities were recorded<\/a> in the City of Brotherly Love from January to August.<\/p>\n

The Democratic mayor, Cherelle Parker, was elected in 2024 on a \u201ctough on crime\u201d platform, pledging to transform Kensington. She has since invested in building a new treatment center where people can live following their detox and tripled the number of police officers assigned to the area.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat has been allowed to become the status quo, standard operating procedure for how life is lived in the Kensington area, it didn\u2019t happen in a day,\u201d she told<\/a> local media in April last year. \u201cI know we\u2019re not going to fix it in a day \u2026 We know we just can\u2019t police our way out.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Parker has been criticised<\/a> over a controversial crackdown on mobile harm reduction services, a scheme which gives<\/a> homeless people one-way bus tickets out of Philadelphia, and the $5.5m Kensington Neighborhood Wellness Court, a same-day diversion pilot program<\/a> which aims to get people who use drugs rapidly into treatment. With most people taking medetomidine, state treatment programmes are increasingly unfit for purpose, activists warn, with supervised overdose prevention sites nowhere in sight after the authorities threw out proposals last year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Back at Sunshine House, during Thanksgiving week, a turkey has just been donated along with a variety of other foods. The act of kindness brings some temporary cheer but, for Pichardo, one of the most potentially impactful ways out of the current chaos in Kensington is being completely ignored.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m all for safe supply,\u201d she says, referring to the legal prescribing of controlled drugs to people with addictions, with schemes showing success in Canada and Switzerland. \u201cYou can have someone do pure heroin, where you know what it does, or you can have this other crazy stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The staff at the harm reduction hub Sunshine House in the middle of Kensington, a neighborhood in north-east…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":466146,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[210,1060,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-466145","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-medication","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-medication","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115767756953735272","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=466145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466145\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/466146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=466145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=466145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=466145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}