Severe skin rotting and painful skin disfigurement are being reported.

Cocaine contaminated with a cheap veterinary dewormer drug is causing ghastly splotches of rotting or dead skin and painful disfigurements on the human body. Reports of grotesque discoloration and excruciating dying skin from cocaine users have filled hospital and police department reports from New York to Los Angeles.

Cocaine traffickers have laced the already powerful drug with levamisole, an antiparasitic drug used by veterinarians to deworm livestock and is banned for human use. Even more frightening is the fact that it’s now reported that upward of 70 percent of the cocaine in the United States is adulterated with levamisole.

A report published this month in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology says that, in six cases, doctors from the University of Rochester Medical Center and the University of California at Los Angeles described horrific-looking splotches of dead skin that developed on or around their ears after snorting or smoking cocaine laced with the banned drug.

The patients from New York and Los Angeles “may represent the tip of the iceberg as a looming public health problem,” the Journal reports.

Only a small fraction of cocaine users will have acute reactions. But Dr. Noah Craft, a dermatologist at Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center and an author of the report, said, “It’s like playing Russian roulette.”

Aside from the threat to users’ skin, cocaine can do plenty of damage even when it does not include levamisole.

According to the Medline Plus, some of the most common serious problems caused by using cocaine include:

• Heart problems, including heart attacks
• Respiratory effects, including respiratory failure
• Nervous system problems, including strokes
• Digestive problems
• Circulatory issues to the extremities, to include the penis.

–terry shropshire