Drug info - Cocaine cut with cancerous drug!!

[Alicia]

Swia apologizes now she thought it should be in the news section hope, its useful folks.

Source Metro News
http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article....&in_page_id=34

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Cocaine cut with cancerous drugs
Thursday, November 23, 2006

Cocaine users were warned the drug is increasingly being cut with a chemical which puts them at a 'very high risk of getting cancer'.

Phenacetin, a banned pain killer which has been linked to kidney and liver cancer, is now the number one cutting agent used by cocaine dealers to bulk out the drug according to experts from the UK's Serious and Organised Crime Agency.

The carcinogenic chemical has a numbing effect similar to cocaine which disguises the drug is impure.

Soca say street prices of cocaine are going down while wholesale prices are going up due to the Class A drug being sold at lower qualities - meaning users are taking more phenacetin.

'The average purity of street cocaine used to be around 30 or 40 per cent now we finding it more commonly between 20 and 30 per cent,' said a Soca spokesman.

'People could be unwittingly exposing themselves to a very high risk of getting cancer by taking cocaine.'

Cocaine is also sometimes cut with sweetener Mannitol, bicarbonate soda and anaesthetics Benzocaine and lignocaine but are not as dangerous as phenacetin.

Bill Hughes, director general of Soca, said while cocaine was now being considered by some users as a 'champagne' drug, the dangers were clearer than ever.

'People are taken in by this nonsense that cocaine is some sort of champagne of drugs.

'Unlike champagne that is subjected to strict manufacturing criteria, this stuff is basically rubbish and it will cause you harm.'

Spokesman for drugs charity DrugScope Henry Shapira says the increased use of phenacetin use is a worry.

He said: 'If cocaine is being cut to 20 per cent purity for a long period of time and the bulk of it was phenacetin then certainly that would be a concern.'

Phenacetin was found to be cancerous in lab rats and has been linked to an increase in death in humans due to cancer, urothelial and renal disease and cardiovascular disease.

Its use is now strictly regulated.


The news comes as new figures released by the Home Office finds that Class A drugs like cocaine are now costing £15bn annually in social and economic costs.

Separate figures from European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drugs Addiction suggest Britons consume more cocaine than almost any other European Union nation.

Almost 5 per cent of young people in England and Wales have tried the drug in the last year, while use among all adults has almost tripled in the past decade.

The Magistrates Association decided to lobby the Government to reverse the controversial reclassification of cannabis from Class B to Class C at their annual conference yesterday.

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Whats Phenacetin?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenacetin

Reputation Comments on this post:

Good find