A new synthetic drug has triggered alarm for the health of many young people and beyond. We are talking about pink cocaine, a dangerous mix of numerous synthetic substances such as “Mdma and ketamine powders and tablets”. This is what emerges from the data released in the latest European drug report (2024). The pink powder has spread like wildfire throughout the world and has already invaded the market of the Old Continent for a couple of years. Without forgetting that the thriving drug market offers “always new mixes”. In detail, these are “products that are not only powerful, but often have not even been tested on humans, so then – explains the psychiatrist and psychotherapist Riccardo Gatti – we do not know the real effects that these substances have in the short and long term” . And again: «We only know that there are a lot of people who go crazy with these mixes and who sometimes get the opposite effect of what they would like. It’s still a great illusion.”
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Regarding how much the new pink powder is worth on the market, the expert Gatti reveals: «I have heard prices on pink cocaine that also seem unlikely. But they increase the value of the product.” Yet there seems to be a certainty, in fact Gatti specifies: «It is the drug of the rich, of love, of who knows what. And he must take into account that the effect of substances is certainly linked to what they have inside, how they act on brain receptors, and so on, but it is also linked to the expectations of those who take it. And the consumer’s expectations, when he finds the product that is called the ‘rich people’s drug’ at an affordable price, all in all increase. Clearly the final price is also affected by the supply chain to put the drug on the market which needs to be repeated is increasingly varied. «They are very different proposals and mark a progressive transition from substances of natural origin to substances that are produced in laboratories. This also has its own meaning with respect to a more complicated international situation: substances of natural origin – specified the expert Gatti – usually travel long distances and along this path at every point they add value, requiring a whole series of agreements on a supply chain that also physically crosses the territories of the world. A world that is becoming a bit polarized at the moment and therefore this could also be what pushes synthetic substances, with which the supply chain from producer to consumer can actually be significantly shortened, so much so that you can even buy them away Internet”.
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Especially in the dark and deep web, in most cases using cryptocurrencies which are very complex to trace. There is at least one other circumstance that worries experts: compared to the past, the mix of substances, often including drugs, is increasingly common. «Within these mixes, we find not only what we define, due to a series of divisions that we have put in place, as illicit drugs, but also a series of legitimate drugs which are used as drugs and which represent a further danger – warns Gatti – The problem we have now, therefore, is that the situation is becoming much more complicated compared to the periods in which there were almost only three or four substances in circulation, and it happened that some imprudent person mixed them together and with alcohol. Now, however, you can find everything and those who go to buy never know what they are buying. Probably not even those who sell that substance know exactly what they are selling.” Among the few certainties is the fact that pink cocaine has a longer history in South America, “where the substance 2CB is reflected in its other name tucibì”. A psychoactive substance belonging to the phenylethylamine family with predominantly psychelidic effects.
