Watch Out for Levamisole in Cocaine Users
“Half of a group of cocaine users tested positive for levamisole, a potentially hazardous veterinary drug that cocaine dealers often use to prepare street product, investigators reported here.
Preliminary data from an ongoing study showed that 24 of 46 cocaine-positive urine samples also contained the anthelmintic, which has been banned for human use in the United States since 2000.
Four of the 46 cocaine users had evidence of vasculitis, an adverse effect of levamisole, and three of the four also tested positive for the deworming drug.
‘The potential public health implications are huge,’ Jennifer Hong, MD, of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., told MedPage Today during a poster presentation at the Society of Critical Care Medicine meeting.
‘Levamisole can be highly toxic in humans, but unless you’re specifically looking for it in a urine sample, you won’t know it’s there. Physicians who treat cocaine users need to be aware of this because most users probably wouldn’t care, even if they knew the drug was contaminated with levamisole.’
Although not available for human use, levamisole remains widely used in veterinary medicine for treating worms in livestock and domesticated animals. The drug can cause agranulocytosis, as well as vasculitis, which prompted the FDA ban on human use.”
