“Pink cocaine,” name-dropped in the Diddy lawsuit and reportedly tied to the death of “One Direction” alum Liam Payne, is becoming a high-profile designer drug. But the contents of the deadly party cocktail tend to fly under the radar.
Payne is believed to have been on pink cocaine and other substances when he fell from a hotel balcony to his death in Buenos Aires, Argentina, last Wednesday.
“It could be mixed with anything,” Bridget Brennan, New York City’s special narcotics prosecutor, told CBS News on Tuesday. Its trademark trio, though, is ketamine, methamphetamine and ecstasy — all of which were found in Payne’s system at the time of his death last week, according to a preliminary toxicology report.
Contrary to what its name might suggest, pink cocaine rarely contains cocaine. Instead, its high volume of ketamine, a potent anesthetic already skyrocketing as a prescription medication as well as surging in misuse, is responsible for its dissociative and psychedelic effects.
“It can put people into a ‘k-hole’ where they feel like they’re in a blank space, like they are disassociated from their body, they’re disassociated from their brain, they don’t know what’s going on,” Brennan said. That’s why it’s a common date rape drug.
Federal authorities last month issued a warning about the substance’s growing prevalence in New York nightclubs, citing an investigation that led to the arrest of a drugs and arms trafficker — and “revealed the lengths these individuals go through to avoid getting caught.”
Pink cocaine originated in Colombia and is also known by the street name “tusi,” a phonetic translation of “2C-B,” a quasi psychedelic that was first synthesized by the drug pioneer Alexander Shulgin in the 1970s, the New York Times reported. (Tusi rarely contains 2C series drugs but shares their psychoactive properties.)
Typically found in pill form and recognizable for its vibrant pink color, added to make it more appealing, pink cocaine is cheap to make but pricey to buy. A gram can cost $20 to $100, DEA Special Agent Frank Tarentino told CBS News.
Investigators are concerned that because premixed pink cocaine from South America is so expensive, domestic traffickers might be making their own batches with cheap ketamine and MDMA purchased from overseas through the mail, the Washington Post reported.
Researchers also fear that fentanyl may begin to appear in pink cocaine, increasing the potential for overdose and death. A task force in California has already seized 4.4 pounds of pink powder containing ketamine and despropionyl fentanyl, a fentanyl precursor, a recent study reported.
Joseph J. Palamar, the epidemiologist at New York University Grossman School of Medicine who wrote the study, told the Post that “fentanyl entering the tusi supply could be disastrous.”
After all, even a minuscule amount of that drug can be lethal, Tarentino told ABC News in August.
“They’re mixing fentanyl in because they want to increase addiction, they want to increase their customer base, they want more people to come back and buy their drug and it’s something every parent should be concerned about,” Tarentino said.
Especially when, as the Los Angeles Times reported in June, it’s so easy for anyone to buy fentanyl on Craigslist.