United States: The drug, a bright pink powder, has gained attention recently after incidents involving famous people, like music star Liam Payne’s death and car crashes involving Instagram models. However, Joseph Palamar, a health expert from NYU Langone, says “pink cocaine” actually started becoming more common in mid-2023.
Many people are just now learning about it, but it’s been around longer than they realize.
Evidently more poisonings are given when there is more prattle.”
When Palamar first learned of pink cocaine, his team went on the lookout on the Reddit platform as part of his research for the National Drug Early Warning System. The organization focuses on narcomonitoring and gathers information about the drugs that might become more popular and dangerous.
As reported by the Yahoo News, “We’ve looked at other drugs,” explained Palamar “and what we found … is that quite often the only indication is that quite often there is much more discussion on social media prior to many poisonings.”
Palamar said there is a whole thing that is referred to as the psychonauts, in which people take entirely new substances or create ‘transient hallucinogenic states’ and then share these on social media. Thus, for drug use Palamar compared it with a diary to remind people about the repercussions of drugs.
Standing before a chart that looks like the New York Stock exchange with posts from the Reddit forum on pink cocaine, Palamar said such post is information he uses to predict the trend of narcotics and alert the public more accurately.
We then send out an email to everybody we could imagine whom we wanted to inform, he said, when we have detected a trend. It is to tell them about themselves, as departments of health, departments of academician, departments of users.
We want to disseminate our information quite widely – if only to discourage any attempt to use it. It’s worrisome because it is already high and is on the rise. We already have dozens of people discussing it per day we have dozens more discussing it per day.”
The warning system was first triggered when there was an increase in chatter from Redditors in February 2023 and alerted the public of pink cocaine. It rose to around 30 per day by the summer, up from the almost double of what was submitted during the last few months of the previous academic year.
“Maybe that is why the chatter at this level is now, on the average higher,” said Palamar. “It’s more consistent. There must be times we could not get dips as low at to those observed in previous years.