Standing Warnings
Our Standing Warnings section has long been a part of the regular Trip Report, but a steady decline in market quality has led to this list growing far beyond our expectations. Rather than preface every report with a page of the same information, we’ll keep any long-term warnings and things to look out for here, and update it as needed.
Pretty Much All Opioids and Benzos
Nitazenes are an emerging class of synthetic opioids that have been showing up in the Americas for a few months now, starting to trickle into the opioid supply in much the same way that fentanyl did. Like fentanyl, they’re a lot more potent than most opioids and can be really difficult to detect by conventional means - hell, at least fentanyl has test strips and media visibility, nitazenes have neither.
Xylazine, meanwhile, is a non-opioid tranquiliser with a little more history of use, although it has historically been pretty isolated to Puerto Rico - this means that xylazine testing resources exist, at least, but the UK is totally unprepared for it.
Nitazenes seem to exhibit a little cross-tolerance with opioids and respond to naloxone treatments, whereas xylazine isn’t an opioid in itself so it benefits from neither. Naloxone should still be given in the case of a xylazine overdose because there is likely an opioid present in the drug the patient has taken.
Worse still, we are seeing a new trend in benzodiazepines as well - samples sold as heroin or benzos have frequently been found to contain both synthetic opioids and benzos, primarily bromazolam. This combination is substantially more dangerous than either drug in isolation, and can mean that even if naloxone saves someone’s life, they may still be unresponsive due to an unknown amount of bromazolam in their system. If the combination is between benzos and xylazine, there is little that a bystander can do to help other than calling for emergency medical aid.
Synthetic Cannabinoids
In recent months, reports have come thicker and faster of obscure research chemicals being sold as cannabis - whether in vape liquid, plant matter or even hash (we’re not sure why, but this was the one that really shocked us), these substances appear to contain no real cannabis at all.
Consider 4F-MDMB-BINACA. Does that name sound intimidating? Good. It’s a bizarre substance which started to appear a few months ago and about which we still know basically nothing. All we can do is compare it to previous “noids”, which have caused thousands of seizures, heart attacks and deaths. While a wide variety of cannabis products are sensibly enjoyed in grown-up countries, the UK is not among them. Instead, the UK is subject to an unregulated criminal market in which the low price, undetectability and ease of transportation for concoctions like 5F-MDMB-PINACA render them a no-brainer for unscrupulous dealers. Did you notice that that’s a completely different substance to the one mentioned up top, by the way? There are hundreds, all with inscrutable names like that.
At this point, there’s very little means to identify synthetic weed yourself, even with reagents. The only advice we can offer is to be extremely careful with a new bag and be ready to send something off to a proper testing service.
Mislabelled Cathinones
Over the last few months, we’ve spotted a steady flow of cathinones starting to appear all over Europe; more often than not, they’re not what they claim to be. Most of them are being sold as mephedrone, which is what we’d expect given that it’s the most popular of the family, but they also seem to be mixing and matching nearly at random among obscure and novel variants.
While their subjective effects are broadly considered to be similar, the required doses can vary hugely from cath to cath and we don’t have the first idea of the long term effects of any cathinone, let alone the totally new substances that are popping up. If you’re interested in cathinones, please bear in mind that this may be the case and either adjust your tester doses accordingly or better yet, just leave them be for now.