LA County Sheriff’s Department program to track deadly drug xylazine
Eden Villalovas
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The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has initiated a pilot program to keep track of the prevalence of xylazine, a deadly sedative that has been increasingly found in street drugs.
Commonly referred to as “tranq,” the substance has been linked to multiple deaths across the country in the last several years and originally appeared more frequently on the East Coast. It has recently become more widespread in the West, pushing law enforcement officials to take action.
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Capt. Ernest Bille of the LASD, who oversees the department’s Scientific Services Bureau, said its focus right now is on fentanyl as overdose deaths continue to rise in California and across the nation.
“However, it goes hand in hand just overall as far as the … amount of illicit drugs that are coming into our communities and the effects of xylazine are horrible,” Bille told the Washington Examiner.
Xylazine can cause severe tissue damage, such as necrosis and gangrene, which can lead to fatal infections or require amputations. Despite the severity of the drug, xylazine remains legal, making tracking its street presence difficult.
The push to track the dangerous drug came in part from a discussion in February with Dr. Chelsea Shover, a UCLA researcher who studied illicit drugs. During a visit to the LA County regional chemistry lab for the sheriff’s department, which serves all of LA County besides the Long Beach and Los Angeles police departments, Shover tested fentanyl and mentioned an increase in the presence of xylazine mixed with the drug.
The sheriff’s department’s program launched in mid-April. Crime labs made preliminary notes by collecting and testing samples of illegal drugs to determine if xylazine was present.
The program will run for a monthlong trial, after which the department will either continue to track xylazine if the numbers produced are low or implement a permanent standard for testing if the numbers are high.
Because the department is a public service agency, the pilot program goes beyond the substance section’s scope of duties, “but public health is a public safety issue, and that’s what we’re in the business of,” Bille said. “And so we want it to be proactive, take a step further because xylazine is in the news everywhere.”
Bille says the program is seeing a low number of incidences currently but that these numbers should not be allowed to downplay the severity of illicit drugs. The sheriff’s department hopes this program will allow the city to get ahead of the situation.
“We’ve got about 1,300 pieces of evidence or samples that have been analyzed, and we’ve seen about three so far, so it’s like 0.3%,” Bille said.
The captain urged the public to avoid illegal street drugs and keep on hand a can of Narcan, an over-the-counter spray used to treat narcotic overdoses.
“The underlying message here is that … a person’s not gonna encounter xylazine unless it’s mixed as an additive in an illicit street drug,” Bille said.
A joint report from the Department of Justice and Drug Enforcement Administration analyzed data from four census regions and found that xylazine-positive fatal overdoses saw an exponential rise from 2020 to 2021.
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“Who knows what they’re adding into these drugs?” Bille said, noting that if xylazine is added, it is detrimental to your health. He pointed to the “flesh-eating aspects” associated with the drug.
Bille hopes to have a report to present the findings to the sheriff’s department superiors and Los Angeles County Public Health by the week of May 22.