Docs struggling for answers as flesh-rotting ‘zombie drug’ tranq grips NY
Travis Eddy was no stranger to the drug game: The 33-year-old mechanic from Long Island had been hooked on heroin off and on for nearly half his life.
But late last year, he unwittingly began smoking crack laced with xylazine — the powerful animal sedative commonly known by its street name, “tranq” — and the game changed overnight.
He began hallucinating, rotting sores dotted his feet and arms and his body erupted in seizures when he tried to get clean.
“There was a change in his behavior when he started using xylazine — he started going cuckoo,” his heartbroken mother, Merri Eddy, recently told The Post. “I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was something different than the fentanyl … It was very frustrating, because I couldn’t help him.”
Heartbroken relatives aren’t the only ones at a loss. Medical professionals have also been struggling to respond to the nefarious tranquilizer as it snakes its way into the wider drug supply, complicating nearly every aspect of treatment and recovery.
“The clinical picture becomes much more diabolical, a lot harder to follow — a lot more can go wrong” when tranq is involved, Dr. Paolo Coppola, the board-certified co-founder of Victory Recovery Partners in Massapequa Park, told The Post in a recent interview.
Overdoses involving xylazine are much harder to treat, Coppola said, because the miracle opioid overdose reversal drug Narcan doesn’t work on the sedative.
“When [an addict] uses a speedball of cocaine and heroin, we can deal with that no problem. You reverse the heroin so they start breathing again and you wait for the cocaine to finish up,” he said.
“Xylazine doesn’t work that way,” the doctor continued. “When they come to the emergency room, you fully expect them to wake up when you push the Narcan … but all of a sudden it’s not really working, they’re not waking up.”
Tranq’s presence sometimes forces doctors to use different drugs to shore up a patient’s falling blood pressure or plummeting heart rate, Coppola added.
Many users also don’t know the drugs they’re shooting, snorting or smoking are laced with xylazine — meaning they don’t even know they’re addicted to it until they try to get clean.
“We think, ‘Wait a minute, he’s on suboxone and he’s on a good enough dose, so why is he still irritable and anxious? Why is his blood pressure up? Why is he having seizures?’” Coppola said, referring to the medication used to treat narcotic dependence.
“If they’ve been using xylazine long enough with their fentanyl, they’ll have withdrawal effects from the xylazine, which screws us up.”
As doctors scramble to catch up, the flesh-rotting, psychosis-inducing tranq is only becoming more popular, and can now be found in most illegal drugs on the market, often alongside the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl, according to law enforcement officials.
Xylazine primarily functions as a veterinary tranquilizer meant to knock out horses and cattle.
So the strength of the sedative strikes human users like a hammer blow to the head, often leaving those who ingest tranq-laced heroin or fentanyl in a state of catatonic semi-consciousness.
This, along with tranq’s tendency to mutilate the skin and leave deep, stomach-churning lesions, have led many to dub it the “zombie drug.”
Even as some states have tightened restrictions, the drug hasn’t been named a controlled substance either federally or in New York, because it was never intended for human use.
That’s made it easier for drug dealers — who realized the cheap cutting agent will extend fentanyl’s high — to flood the market with it, experts say.
“That’s why it’s become popular: Now, your high goes from one or two hours to more like four to five hours,” Dr. Steve Salvatore, Victory’s co-founder and president, told The Post. “You’re going to be seeing a lot more of xylazine.”
Local and federal law enforcement have sounded a similar alarm.
In an interview last month, officials from the US Drug Enforcement Administration told The Post that the agency is starting to see crooks ship kilograms of tranq powder into the country — something they’d never seen before.
“They’re getting it here in large quantities … and we’re seeing it more commonly,” said Frank Tarentino, the special agent in charge of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration’s New York Division. “It’s widespread. And it’s getting worse.”
Statistics bolster their anecdotal evidence. The DEA has found that 15% of all drugs tested in its Northeast regional laboratory include xylazine, according to Tarentino. Of those, 85% contained the viciously lethal mix of xylazine and fentanyl.
In New York City — which began testing opioid overdose fatalities for tranq two years ago — about one in five deaths involved xylazine, according to the state Department of Health.
The epidemic is likely to cause headaches for emergency room doctors throughout the nation, according to the medical professionals at Victory, which operates a constellation of rehab centers throughout Long Island.
Especially because tranq amplifies the effects of whatever drug it’s paired with, they said.
“If your drug was X amount dangerous, well, now it’s twice as dangerous,” Salvatore said. “I don’t think people realize that … I think they’re just thinking they’ll get a better high. Not that they have a greater chance of dying.”
But perhaps the most disturbing part is how xylazine affects users after they have decided to get clean.
Often, doctors prescribe medicines like suboxone or sublocade to ward off the intense cravings that thunder alongside opioid addiction.
But xylazine slips past this pharmaceutical defense, leaving its victims an anxious, irritable mess.
“It makes it a lot more difficult to try to wean this person off opiates, it makes it a lot harder to treat,” Coppola said. “And it makes the patient not trust the [suboxone] — he thinks, ‘Oh, suboxone doesn’t work for me.’ Not true. It’s working for their opiate, it’s not working for their xylazine.”
Former addicts know fentanyl makes them feel better, Coppola noted, so they might hit the street during a bout of hopelessness, and jump right back down the rabbit hole from which they just emerged.
“As far as he’s concerned, he knows he’ll feel better if he goes to that same dealer and gets his fentanyl that has xylazine in it,” the doctor said.
Tranq withdrawal can also cause potentially fatal seizures — which battered Eddy, the tranq user from Lindenhurst, LI, when he tried to kick his habit.
It’s impossible to know whether the tranq or some other drug caused the seizures, according to his fiancée, Irene Swartz. But they scared him enough that he wanted to get clean afterward.
Unfortunately, it was not to be.
On Feb. 23, his mom and fiancée found Eddy dead on the bedroom floor with a needle still pinned to his vein.
It was likely the heroin that killed him, but there’s no doubt tranq magnified both his addiction and the potency of the drugs he was ingesting.
“There was no texting, talking to him, screaming at him … There was just a body on the floor,” Swartz said. “The love of my life, on the floor, because of a drug he decided to use was laced [with] xylazine.”
His passing has left a hole in the heart of his beloved, who can’t help but remember Eddy’s bright smile and loving nature.
“I told him several times, ‘I don’t want to find you, it will kill me if I lose you,'” she said. “But the addiction was so strong … he was gone.”
