Cocaine cut with a powder used to de-worm farm animals, is being sold in the UK and can cause drug users’ skin to ‘rot’.
According to a study, around 80 per cent of the UK’s cocaine market is said to use levamisole, which can cause all sorts of nasty effects, like skin lesions, discolouration and rotting of the skin where blood cells rupture.
Nice.
A study in the British Medical Journal reported doctors were treating a patient with ‘mysterious open skin lesions and severe abdominal and joint pain’ but couldn’t pinpoint what was causing her symptoms.
Doctors ran chemical tests on her hair before they realised the condition had been caused by levamisole which had been in cocaine she’d taken, writes the Mirror.
Levamisole can also lead to a drop in your white blood cell count, which leaves sufferers ‘feeling like they have HIV’, according to Dr Noah Craft, a dermatologist at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.
Best avoided.
