“Pink cocaine”, name-dropped in the Sean “Diddy” Combs lawsuit and reportedly tied to the death of former One Direction singer Liam Payne, is becoming a high-profile designer drug. But the contents of the deadly party cocktail tend to fly under the radar.
Payne is believed to have been on pink cocaine and other substances when he fell from a hotel balcony to his death in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on October 16.
“It could be mixed with anything,” Bridget Brennan, New York’s special narcotics prosecutor, told CBS News on Tuesday. Its trademark trio, though, is ketamine, methamphetamine and Ecstasy – all of which were found in Payne’s system at the time of his death last week, according to a preliminary toxicology report.
Contrary to what its name might suggest, pink cocaine rarely contains cocaine. Instead, its high volume of ketamine, a potent anaesthetic already skyrocketing as a prescription medication as well as surging in misuse, is responsible for its dissociative and psychedelic effects.
“It can put people into a ‘k-hole’ where they feel like they’re in a blank space, like they are disassociated from their body, they’re disassociated from their brain, they don’t know what’s going on,” Brennan said. That’s why it’s a common date rape drug.
US federal authorities last month issued a warning about the substance’s growing prevalence in New York nightclubs, citing an investigation that led to the arrest of a drugs and arms trafficker – and “revealed the lengths these individuals go through to avoid getting caught”.
