According to news reports 27 people overdosed in Baltimore on Thursday on a drug packaged as “New Jack City” and possibly contaminated with Freon or antifreeze. I am guessing that the primary drug is fentanyl, but I don’t know that. The samples of “New Jack City” were given out as free samples by an as yet unnamed drug dealer and his minions, a practice that is not uncommon when a drug dealer wants to gain attention for his product. Often the samples are stronger than the for sales bags that will follow. Dealers often start their new products out with stronger potency to create buzz, and then slowly diminish them, before starting to distribute a new latest/greatest product. It’s marketing.
I am guessing that New Jack City is fentanyl mixed with adulterants and that the freon or antifreeze are secret ingredients, which possibly poisoned people as opposed to New Jack City simply being a fentanyl product of higher purity. No one has died yet, but several are in critical condition — that makes me think the poisoning is due more to the adulterants that make people sick rather than a higher purity fentanyl that would cause people to stop breathing and die if they are using alone with no one to find them. This is just speculation on my part. It could be both. It could also be a synthetic cannaboid. Let’s hope we know soon, and let’s hope this product is just the product of a local dealer who mixed the wrong ingredients rather than a more global product that might cause more widespread overdose events.
The take home message from this event — that can be taught even before we learn all the details –is that the nation’s drug supply is toxic. The iron law of prohibition is that when you make something illegal, it will always be replaced by even more concentrated dangerous drugs. Alcohol in the 20’s was replaced by wood alcohol that poisoned many Americans. Heroin has largely been replaced by fentanyl, a far stronger and deadlier drug. The adulterants we have seen lately, xylazine, medetomidine and others are not meant for human consumption. Antifreeze and Freon certainly aren’t meant for humans either. It might get them high, but more likely it makes them sick.
Let’s give great credit to the Baltimore community outreach efforts to get the word out about the dangers of the drug, to distribute naloxone in case the overdoses are opioid induced, and other harm reduction materials.
Note: The name New Jack City refers to a 1991 movie starring Wesley Snipes as a drug dealer in New York City. For a time in Hartford, a building on Main Street in the North End was known locally as new Jack City for its extensive drug-dealing.