President Joe Biden’s drug czar on Wednesday declared that fentanyl mixed with xylazine, an animal tranquilizer known as “tranq” that has been linked to a rising number of overdose deaths across the U.S., represents an “emerging threat” facing the nation.
The declaration from Dr. Rahul Gupta, the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, requires the Biden administration to develop a federal plan to address the crisis. The government must now publish a response plan within 90 days and send implementation guidance to agencies within 120 days, among other steps.
“As the president’s drug policy adviser, I am deeply concerned about what this threat means for the nation,” Gupta told reporters during a briefing call on Tuesday, later adding: “We must act and act now.”
Gupta’s announcement marks the first time a presidential administration has formally labeled an illicit drug an “emerging threat” and then required the federal government to take further action — a legal authority it gained under the SUPPORT Act, a sweeping bill signed into law by former President Donald Trump in 2018.
Research has shown that opioids like fentanyl are increasingly combined with xylazine and sold on the illicit drug market, according to the National Institutes of Health. The spread of xylazine-laced fentanyl has exacerbated the nationwide addiction crisis, ravaging communities and deepening the toll of addiction.
Xylazine is not approved for human use, and ingesting it can cause serious, life-threatening effects, according to the Food and Drug Administration. People who inject it can develop flesh wounds, including blackened, rotting tissue (known as necrosis); if untreated, those injuries may result in amputation, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The tranquilizer was approved by the FDA for veterinary use in 1972, and it is typically used on horses, cows, sheep and other nonhuman mammals as a sedative and pain reliever, according to the FDA.
Gupta said the federal government would be mindful that xylazine has “legitimate” uses in the veterinary profession and agriculture industry while it works to “head off” the production and distribution of the substance’s illicit forms.
The federal government has previously sounded the alarm about “tranq” in stark terms. The DEA issued an alert last month warning of a “sharp increase in the trafficking of fentanyl mixed with xylazine.”
“Xylazine is making the deadliest drug threat our country has ever faced, fentanyl, even deadlier,” DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said in a statement on March 20.
Milgram said that the DEA has seized xylazine and fentanyl mixtures in 48 of 50 states. Xylazine was detected in approximately 23% of fentanyl powder and 7% of fentanyl pills seized by the DEA in 2022, she added.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 107,735 people in America died between August 2021 and August 2022 from drug poisonings, with 66% of those deaths involving synthetic opioids such as fentanyl.
The full number of xylazine-linked overdose deaths is not known, according to the National Institutes of Health, but research shows those deaths have fanned westward across the U.S., wreaking most havoc in the Northeast.
In hard-hit Pennsylvania, for example, the percentage of all drug overdose involving xylazine rose from 2% to 26% from 2015 to 2020, according to the NIH. Xylazine was linked to 19% of all drug overdose deaths in Maryland in 2021 and 10% in Connecticut in 2020.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
