Those watching Toronto’s drug supply say animal tranquilizers which cause flesh-eating wounds are turning up in street drugs with concerning frequency. "We are seeing it fairly frequently," Ray Clark, a health promoter at Parkdale Queen West Community Health Centre, recently told CTV News Toronto. The centre runs two safe consumption sites and oversees 1,100 client visits per month.
They say more people are coming in with wounds caused by animal tranquilizers, or tranqs, that are being added to fentanyl. One of the drugs, Xylazine, was first found in Toronto’s drug supply in Sept. 2020.
Another, Medetomidine, first turned up in the city's drug supply in Dec. 2023. Neither drug is approved for human consumption.
Injecting them can cause wounds all over the body. "Our nurses are doing wound care once, twice, three times a day," Clark said. "If I'm injecting here, Xylazine-associated wounds could appear on my leg, on my torso, on my calf.
" While naloxone can reverse the effects of fentanyl on a person experiencing an overdose, it cannot negate the dangerous effect of the tranquilizers, which are being added to the drugs. Hayley Thompson with Toronto's Drug Checking Service says the levels of the tranquilizers in the drug supply also appear to be increasing. "The potency of those drugs we’ve seen steadily increase," she said.
Her group works out of St. Michael's Hospital and regularly analyzes samples of street drugs in a lab. They first identified the tranquilizers in Toro.
