​By Lisa Marie Basile | Fact-checked by Barbara Bekiesz 
| Published February 22, 2023 MD Linx

Key Takeaways

• Xylazine (or “Tranq”) is a dangerous new recreational drug often combined with other substances. It is responsible for a growing number of overdoses. 
• It can lead to skin ulcers, central nervous system and respiratory depression, hypotension, and other health complications, including death.
• There are no FDA-approved medications available to treat xylazine dependence. Naloxone does not work to reverse potential overdoses.

​A dangerous new recreational drug, xylazine—also referred to as “tranq”—has made its way through cities across America. Its effects can cause serious health consequences and, in many cases, overdose and death, according to the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence.[1] 
Xylazine’s impact in recent years is undeniable. For example, deaths related to xylazine in Pennsylvania jumped from 2 percent to 26 percent from 2015 to 2020, while xylazine was involved in 19 percent of all overdose deaths in Maryland in 2021.[2]  Deaths related to xylazine may also be underreported, as many forensic labs and toxicology tests do not test for xylazine. Its popularity comes down to how cheap it is to access and how strong its effects are. According to Abid Nazeer, MD, a psychiatrist and senior medical advisor for Symetria Recovery, “Xylazine’s popularity is connected to its ability to potentially extend the effect of other drugs, such as heroin and fentanyl.” Xylazine can also be bought very cheaply by dealers, who can order it online, Nazeer tells MDlinx.

​TO CONTINUE READING: https://www.mdlinx.com/article/lethal-street-drug-resistant-to-naloxone-gains-popularity/6Sl08mQtC5IoZK7QjkqjSA?

Over the past year, we have seen a sweeping and ferocious attack on the rights and dignity of transgender people across the country.
In states led by Republicans, conservative lawmakers have introduced or passed dozens of laws that would give religious exemptions for discrimination against transgender people, prohibit the use of bathrooms consistent with their gender identity and limit access to gender-affirming care.
In lashing out against L.G.B.T.Q. people, lawmakers in at least eight states have even gone as far as to introduce bans on “drag” performance that are so broad as to threaten the ability of gender-nonconforming people simply to exist in public.
Some of the most powerful Republicans in the country want to go even further. Donald Trump has promised to radically limit transgender rights if he is returned to the White House in 2024. In a video address to supporters, he said he would push Congress to pass a national ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth and restrict Medicare and Medicaid funding for hospitals and medical professionals providing that care.

​TO CONTINUE READING: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/10/opinion/trump-desantis-transgender-rights.html?auth=login-google1tap&login=google1tap

By Noah Weiland, NY Times    Feb. 10, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET

​President Biden has endorsed “harm reduction,” which aims to cut down on overdoses by encouraging safer drug use. But the organizations carrying out that strategy are severely underfunded.

OSCEOLA, Iowa — So many of Deborah Krauss’s friends and neighbors have died of drug overdoses during the pandemic that she said she felt as if she had been living inside of a dream. The longest she has gone without someone dying, she noted, is three weeks. Her calendar grew cluttered with funerals.
“I lost count at 40,” she recalled on a recent evening in a Des Moines office as she organized supplies to help people consume drugs more safely. “And it just keeps happening.”
The next day, Ms. Krauss was on the road, parked outside a Walmart in the small Iowa town of Osceola, her trunk brimming with boxes of syringes, fentanyl test strips and overdose-reversing medication. A former hair stylist, she recalled the stress of grooming an ex-boyfriend’s facial hair to make him presentable at his funeral after he died from an overdose in 2018.

Ms. Krauss, 38, is one of the few practitioners in Iowa of a public health strategy known as “harm reduction,” a wide-ranging set of policies that President Biden and many federal and local health officials and physicians have made central to their efforts to curtail record-breaking overdose deaths. The strategy does not seek to cut people off from drug use. Instead, it aims to give them tools to use drugs in a safer manner, like the supplies in Ms. Krauss’s trunk.

In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Mr. Biden, the first president to endorse the strategy, highlighted the federal government’s attention to some of the core features of harm reduction work, including a provision in a recently enacted spending package that makes it easier for doctors to prescribe buprenorphine, an effective addiction medication that Ms. Krauss works to get to drug users. During his speech, Mr. Biden recognized the father of a 20-year-old from New Hampshire who died from a fentanyl overdose, citing the more than 70,000 Americans dying each year from the potent synthetic .

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https://www-nytimes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.nytimes.com/2023/02/10/us/politics/harm-reduction-overdoses-iowa.amp.html