Los Angeles officials are trying to stop the spread of the flesh-eating drug xylazine that has taken over the city.
The ‘zombie drug’, a veterinary tranquilizer approved in the US for cows and horses, is now flooding the illicit US drug market, with dealers often cutting it with cocaine and heroin.
The drug has spread to Los Angeles of late, with news crews capturing people hunched over and on the ground, strung out on the drug.
The problem, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s officials say, is that the drug is technically a legal substance.
The county is now desperately trying to track xylazine’s presence throughout the city, according to KTLA.
The DEA and the county’s health department have both broadcast serious cautions against the use of the drug.
‘When combined with opioids like fentanyl, as is frequently the case, xylazine enhances the life-threatening effect of respiratory depression (slowing or stopping breathing) caused by opioids, increasing the risk of overdose and death,’ county officials said.
Tracking the drug, officials say, will permit them to get an impression of just how serious the problem is and the best protocols to cut it out.
Nurses have detailed the wounds caused by xylazine as appearing as though something is ‘eating away your flesh from the inside out’.
Several liberal politicians and city leaders have undertaken to carry out multiple policies to impede the many issues that have arisen because of the rising homeless and drug-addicted population.
One specific harm reduction policy that failed was the opening of the Tenderloin Center in San Francisco last year – a facility that was meant to help ease the city’s drug and homelessness crisis.
It cost taxpayers an astounding $22million and was intended to be a ‘safe place’ for addicts to ‘get high without getting robbed’ and without fear of fatally overdosing.
Users were also meant to be directed to help centers, though during its first four months of operations, it referred just 18 people of the more than 23,000 who were welcomed to the site.
The Zombie apocalypse below Hollywood land!
Flesh eating drug 'tranq/xylazine' in LA streets. Officials say they can't ban it because it's legal!It's all by design and looks like a giant experiment the government is doing with these drugs! pic.twitter.com/cWh4HW5OL2
— Ronald Kelly (@RonK3l) May 15, 2023
Overall, less than 1 percent of visits to the Tenderloin Center resulted in a ‘completed linkage’ to behavioral health programs.
Regarelss of their efforts, 2022 saw upward of 500 fatalities from overdoses in San Francisco. In 2021, that figure was 641.
Officials had also anticipated the site would offer a location to deal with the homeless epidemic the city has been challenged with in recent months and years.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed had originally set aside just $10million for the project but it quickly increased to more than double that estimate.
In total, some 400 individuals were given the assistance each day at the center, according to the San Francisco Department of Public Health.
A very big portion of those who took advantage of the site used it especially for shelter or food.
The homelessness crisis in San Francisco is strengthened by the ongoing fentanyl crisis. The synthetic drug is taken by a substantial portion of the city’s homeless population and had made its way into the public drug stream, endangering teenagers and others across the city.
Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid several times more powerful than heroin, is often combined with cocaine and other stimulants and consumed unwittingly by recreational drug users.
After the number of US deaths connected to overdoses linked to synthetic opioids increased to 70,000 last year, public health officials go on to sound the alarm over the extraordinarily potent nature of the drug.
Overdose deaths have excalated over the last three years, increasing by 50 percent from 52,000 in 2016 to 106,000 in 2021.
The White House blamed the majority to fentanyl poisoning or overdose, and say the drug comes almost entirely from China via Mexico, with a handful of cartels responsible for toting them across the border.
Six out of 10 fake prescription pills tested by the DEA in 2022 contained fentanyl, and the ‘vast majority’ came from the Sinaloa and Jalisco Cartels.
For years, the synthetic drug had been used as a cheaper, more easily attainable substitute for heroin. Now though, it is being chopped up with cocaine, MDMA and packed into pills too.
The problems are more numerous than simply drugs, of course, as California is by far the worst hit by the nation’s homelessness crisis.
It has about a third of all the country’s homeless people, and Los Angeles, San Jose, Oakland and other Golden State cities have among the largest numbers of unsheltered people in the country.
The US Department of Housing and Urban Development says 582,462 people did not have a permanent home on a single night in January last year when researchers carried out their most recent snapshot survey.
Some 60 percent of the destitute were in shelters, crashing with friends or relatives, or had other temporary digs. The rest were ‘unsheltered’ — sleeping in cars, on the streets or in derelict buildings.
