Liam Payne death: Pink cocaine is no cocaine, so what’s in the mystery drug?

There’s alarm about a relatively new drug that’s hit the party-drug scene in the US and Europe. The drug is pink cocaine, and is in the news after the death of One Direction singer Liam Payne. Pink cocaine is pink, but not cocaine, and experts are worried because no one is sure what goes into the drug concoction and in what proportions. It is a mystery drug with unpredictable results and long-term addiction risk.

Pink cocaine is seeing wide discussion after 31-year-old pop star Liam Payne fell to his death from a third-floor hotel balcony in Argentina.

ABC News and TMZ said initial toxicology reports suggested Payne had pink cocaine in his system at the time of his death. Experts suspected it was pink cocaine because a cocktail of drugs, including ketamine, methamphetamine and MDMA, had been detected.

Pink cocaine was reportedly found by police in the New York hotel room of music mogul and rapper Sean (Diddy) Combs, who is facing sex trafficking and abuse charges.

Pink cocaine gets its colour from the pink edible dye used in it. Other than the colour, nothing else is a standard for the drug. It varies from batch to batch, depending on what the underground chemist has mixed and in what ratio.

Usually sold as a powder and snorted, pink cocaine originated in Latin America in the 1970s. It saw a revival around 2010 in Colombia, spread through Latin America and reached Europe, according to The Irish Star.

It costs about $99 per gram, the report said. That pink cocaine is cheap is one of the reasons why it is popular, The New York Times quoted Linda Cottler, an epidemiologist who studies substance abuse at the University of Florida, as saying.

Pink cocaine is also known as tusi, which is a phonetic translation of 2C, a series of psychedelic phenethylamines, Joseph J Palamar, an associate professor at New York University, wrote in a research paper in 2023.

Palmar says multiple drug checking studies have found that the majority of pink cocaine samples primarily contain ketamine, often combined with MDMA (Ecstasy), methamphetamine, and opioids, and/or new psychoactive substances. Some samples might have low amounts of cocaine.

“Ketamine is going to dethrone Ecstasy very soon, and tusi is really going to bump it up,” Palamar told The New York Times.

Most pink cocaine samples have at least one stimulant and a depressant.

Ketamine: A powerful anaesthetic with dissociative, sedative, and hallucinogenic properties. Ketamine abuse can lead to loss of consciousness, difficulty breathing, and in severe cases, death.

Methamphetamine: A highly addictive stimulant known for its euphoric effects and potential for severe physical and psychological dependence.

MDMA (Ecstasy): A common party drug with stimulant and minor psychedelic properties, often associated with feelings of euphoria and increased energy.

“I worry that people think that pink cocaine is cocaine, which it is not. It’s a pretty pink powder, it’s a mystery powder. You don’t really know what’s in it,” Palmar told CBC News.

Why it is worrying about Palmar is that users expecting the purely stimulant effect of cocaine might end up with the depressant effects of ketamine.

“The tusi phenomenon complicates the drug landscape because it has the potential to confuse both people who use it and researchers alike,” writes Palmar in his research paper.

So, what does pink cocaine do to a user?

“Depends on what is actually in it…making it unpredictable. If one batch contains lots of meth, people can get sympathomimetic effects. If another batch contains a bunch of ketamines, people can get hallucinations/psychomotor changes etc,” explains Josh Trebach, a celebrity medical toxicologist.

It is the mystery of the pink powder’s contents and the unpredictability of what it might do to a user that make it the worst kind of drug, say experts. It’s just the underground chemist who knows what’s gone into the batch of the pink cocaine. The dealers don’t know what they are selling, and the users are unaware of what they are snorting. Drug enforcement agencies across the world now have a mysterious pink powder to deal with.