Follow It was a medical mystery. In the summer of 2008, a man and woman, both in their 20s and both cocaine users, were separately admitted to a Canadian hospital with unremitting fevers, flulike symptoms and dangerously low white-blood-cell counts.

Their symptoms were consistent with a life-threatening immune-system disorder called agranulocytosis, which kills 7% to 10% of patients and is rare except in chemotherapy patients and those taking certain antipsychotic medications. Neither of the Canadian patients fit that bill, but they did have one thing in common: illegal drug use, says Dr.

Dec 16, 2017. Cut with other drugs and agents so dealers can make a larger profit. Benzocaine; Boric acid; Fentanyl; Levamisole; Lidocaine; Mannitol. Apr 27, 2018 - Contents • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Physical and chemical properties In purer forms, crack rocks appear as off-white nuggets with jagged.

Nancy Zhu, who treated the patients during her hematology fellowship at the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton. 'We were theorizing that maybe it was something in the cocaine,' she says. The medical literature didn't contain any studies linking agranulocytosis with cocaine. However, in April of that same year, a New Mexico lab had identified a small number of unexplained cases of the disorder, also in people who had snorted, injected or smoked cocaine. Later, in 2009, a few cocaine addicts in San Francisco — crack smokers, mostly — began displaying even stranger symptoms, like dead, darkened skin.

'It looked like people were getting burns all over their body,' says Dr. Jonathan Graf, a rheumatologist at the University of California, San Francisco. '[Their skin was] black, as if you had taken a cigarette butt to it. In some people, it was all over, on their legs and bellies.' By that time, back in Canada, a toxicologist at Alberta Hospital had noticed an unusual chemical in the urine of the two cocaine-using patients: levamisole.

Zhu contacted him, and they put the puzzle together. Further research revealed that levamisole, a drug that was once used to treat colon cancer but is now reserved for veterinary use as a medication to get rid of worms, can cause agranulocytosis in humans. The 'burns' seen on Californian patients, who also were suffering from agranulocytosis, were the result of skin infections related to patients' compromised immunity. There have now been several dozen cases of cocaine-related agranulocytosis reported in North America — and one known death.

'For some reason, this drug called levamisole keeps popping up,' Zhu says. Where is it coming from? According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, levamisole has become increasingly popular as a 'cut,' or diluting agent, in cocaine and possibly some heroin. It is now found in 70% of all cocaine seized in the U.S., up from 30% in 2008. Unlike most cuts — usually inert or relatively harmless substances like the B vitamin inositol, which are added by lower-level dealers looking to stretch supplies — levamisole appears to be added to cocaine from the outset, in the countries of origin.

The substance has been found in various concentrations in cocaine analyzed in countries around the world, from Switzerland to Australia. And urine tests of cocaine users attending a drug clinic at San Francisco General Hospital in 2009 — one floor above Graf's office — found that 90% of samples were positive for levamisole; similar tests in Seattle revealed that 80% of cocaine users there had levamisole in their systems. Download naruto kecil sub indo. 'If it's showing up in all those different places, that's a prima facie indicator that it's happening at the highest levels of production,' says Craig Reinarman, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has long studied cocaine. But since cocaine is illegal, there's no easy way to remove levamisole from the supply chain.

One piece gigant battle 2 - shin sekai. Law enforcement could instead target large purchasers, possibly putting pressure on dealers to switch to other cuts. Levamisole is cheap, widely available and seems to have the right look, taste and melting point to go unnoticed by cocaine users, which may alone account for its popularity. 'Ease of availability seems likely to be important,' says Reinarman.