A person finds a roommate non-responsive. First responders arrive and declare the 55-year-old Port Orchard man deceased. In another incident, a family member discovers a 26-year-old Bremerton man unconscious in the home. Medical personnel arrive to find that man also died.
Both drug overdose deaths happened last year and were the result of a cocktail of illicit substances, said Jeff Wallis, supervisor of the medical examiner’s office. Drugs found in both were fentanyl and xylazine, or “tranq” – a drug said to increase the high associated with deadly fentanyl and not widely seen in Kitsap County … yet.
Xylazine is a veterinary sedative not approved for human use. Veterinarians use the drug in animals as a tranquilizer, pain reliever and central nervous system depressant. When used by people it can slow breathing, heart rate and blood pressure to dangerously low levels, the National Institute of Drug Abuse says. Repeated xylazine use is associated with deep flesh wounds and open sores.
In the world of illegally manufactured drugs, xylazine is increasingly being mixed into opioids, most frequently fentanyl, the NIDA says. On the street the drug is known as “tranq.”
Xylazine’s limited use in Kitsap County is not expected to last, several local drug treatment specialists said. The substance is frequently being found in illicit drugs on the East Coast.
“I can say with certainty (that) typically everything that starts on the East Coast eventually will find its way to us,” said Keith Winfield, program manager for the Kitsap Recovery Center.
So far, KRC’s outreach team has had contact with only one young man in the county who admitted to regularly using tranq, Winfield said.
KRC is an inpatient residential substance abuse treatment center in Port Orchard. The center has beds for inpatient treatment and detox services and provides outpatient services. Much of the county’s homeless population utilizes the center, Winfield said.
Jolene Kron, administrator of Salish Behavioral Health Administrative Services, added: “Our community outreach team saw a rash of tranq a year and a half to two years ago – involving two to four folks. The numbers currently are few and far between.”
This year, five to 10 people going through the county’s criminal justice system were found to have xylazine in their system, Kron said.
While the reported use of xylazine is minimal, it is possible that tally is deceptively low and in reality, more local drug users are ingesting the animal medicine. “There’s not a lot of testing for xylazine. If the hospital gets people coming in for help with substance abuse, they’re not testing for it. Our outreach teams aren’t testing for it in our UA’s,” Winfield said.
Kron agreed. “I think it definitely could easily be underrepresented because folks aren’t being tested.”
The Addictions, Drug and Alcohol Institute at the University of Washington says, “Xylazine cases are undercounted because it is not a controlled substance and is inconsistently reported in crime lab data.”
Also contributing to the likely underreporting is it is frequently mixed with unlawfully manufactured opioids. That can result in users unknowingly taking it, Winfield said.
In case of an overdose, the Center for Disease and Control and Prevention recommends naloxone and mouth-to-mouthresuscitation.
To prepare for the expected rise in xylazine use, the community needs to expand testing, Winfield said, adding that it already is in the works. Treatment facilities also need to be ready to deal with the medical issues that come with the open wounds that result from xylazine use, he added.
“We need to bolster our resources for treatment and prevention within the community. That could be expanding more beds and adding more services to those beds involving collaboration with medical professionals … to manage the complex ulcers and abscesses that we see with this stuff,” Winfield said.
