![]() ![]() The chemical is embalming fluid, and users are buying tobacco or marijuana cigarettes that have been soaked in it, then dried. What we really need to do is warn our kids away from it.PHILADELPHIA (AP) - A chemical used to preserve the dead is becoming an increasingly popular drug for users looking for a new and different high, one which often comes with violent and psychotic side effects, official say. So if the finer points of PCP elude us, so what? What we really need to know is that it’s back - big time. “Craze,” formerly Hartford’s most wanted fugitive until he was nabbed in Canada in December, 2001, and charged with killing one man and shooting three other people.Īnd to think PCP is finding a place at raves beside so-called hug-drugs such as Ecstasy and date-rape drug GHB - and that “love” and “lovely” are among its street names. Police say Sonny Flowers was on it in June when he stabbed his 2-year-old daughter in the skull repeatedly with an 8-inch carving knife, also wounding her mother and Douglas Lariviere, the first police officer at the scene, stabbing him in the head and neck.Īnother regular smoker was Anthony Ewing, a.k.a. “The person I’m doing an autopsy on may have died because he got shot - but before he got shot, he may have been smoking illy.” Though it has been cited as a cause of death twice in this state, it isn’t particularly lethal, but it could get you killed, according to Gilchrist. You feel no pain whatsoever - so you may well keep advancing, even though you are mortally wounded, out-manned and out-armed.Īnd because you hallucinate intensely, you may come out of it “in an altered state of reality and be really frightened, defensive and combative.” Illy or wet doesn’t make you crazy, per se, though you may behave that way nor does it convey superhuman strength, though you may perform feats of strength and take chances you otherwise wouldn’t. If you injected it, “it would hurt a hell of a lot.” But if you smoke plain formaldehyde and it does something to you “it’s all in your head,” he said. “Your eyes water, they burn, your nose burns, your mouth burns - it makes you think your head came off, and God help you if you spill any on your skin,” Gilchrist said. ![]() One of life’s little ironies is that because its smell is similar to PCP, formaldehyde was one of its street names during the 70s.īut PCP doesn’t even come close to its acrid, irritating stench. Even in the days before it came prepackaged at that strength, when medical examiners mixed it themselves, “I never even felt remotely high from it,” he said. The purest formaldehyde you can get is 37 percent, which labs now purchase diluted 10 times. Thomas Gilchrist, associate medical examiner for the state. Turpentine, acetone, formaldehyde - whatever the agent that is carrying the PCP has to evaporate, leaving almost nothing behind.Īnd formaldehyde wouldn’t even give you a little buzz, wet or dry, says Dr. Marketing it as embalming fluid plays a big role in its comeback - big enough that funeral homes in New York and other states across the country have been burglarized by thieves demanding formaldehyde.īig enough that dealers unable to obtain it substitute turpentine or other noxious substances for show. Pinder says he was warned of this trend five years ago, when he went to the prison on Weston Street in Hartford to talk to inmates about cocaine and heroin, and they told him ” wet was a lot more significant.”Įver since, he has seen an increase in submissions of PCP. Well, Nordstrom’s could take that same can of soup, slap Gucci on it, and everybody would want some.” You walk into Stop & Shop, you can buy a can of soup under the Stop & Shop label. “The formaldehyde has to evaporate before you smoke it, so how does a kid know it’s in there? Because the dealer tells him it is,” Pinder said. The “wet” that police have been turning over to him increasingly during the past year has taken the form of a liquid, usually clear, or a granular blackish powder that tests positive for PCP. Pinder suspects formaldehyde may not even be a component in some cases. He thought formaldehyde was the active ingredient, as did I until I talked to Pinder, who analyzes illicit drugs seized on the streets by police. “It’ll make you want to kill yourself, but it’s become the thing to do,” he said. Getting off on formaldehyde has a certain Gothic appeal to teens, who gain a sense of bravado from it. ![]()
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