I read that cocaine is cut with strychnine, arsenic, or other substances to stretch the volume for increased profits. I can understand milk sugar in heroin, but why these deadly poisons? Do they accelerate the effect of the drug or what? –Max Buscher, Cambridge, Massachusetts
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Dunno, but they sure scare the pants off potential users, which is maybe why strychnine and other poisons figure so prominently in media and medical reports of the dangers of drugs. Truth is, adulterating cocaine with strychnine or arsenic seems to be relatively rare. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration analyzed 2,944 samples of cocaine confiscated in five big cities (well, semibig–one was Buffalo) between 1974 and 1980. The DEA reported only those adulterants found in at least 5 percent of the samples, and strychnine and arsenic didn’t make the cut. Here’s the stuff that did: lactose (milk sugar), 29 percent of samples; lidocaine (local anesthetic), 29 percent; mannitol, 26 percent; inositol, 10 percent; dextrose, 8 percent. (The last three items are all sugars.)
The fact that coke isn’t usually cut with rat poison doesn’t mean the stuff it is cut with is harmless. Milk sugar won’t do much to you apart from irritating your nose, but the same can’t be said for lidocaine. Lidocaine, benzocaine, procaine, and other local anesthetics are used to stretch cocaine because they can’t be readily distinguished from the real thing when snorted. But if you get too much–and the average street sample of cocaine is only 40 percent pure, leaving a lot of room for chemical surprises–you could suffer tremors, hallucinations, seizures, or in the odd case death. And since the stuff you buy on corners doesn’t have the ingredients printed on the side, you won’t even be sure what from. Let the buyer beware.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Illustration/Slug Signorino.
