The staff at the harm reduction hub Sunshine House in the middle of Kensington, a neighborhood in north-east Philadelphia home to the most notorious open drug scene in the US, often reverse at least one overdose a day.
But the mutating illegal drug supply is regularly conjuring new drugs with novel sets of potentially deadly risks. For the past 18 months, there has been a new drug in circulation, the veterinary sedative medetomidine, also known as “rhino tranq”. It has perhaps the most extreme and fast-acting withdrawal symptoms of all known street drugs.
