A 10-month-old child died due to an opioid overdose last year, according to investigation findings released earlier this week and as reported by The Connecticut Mirror. Mixed in with the opioid was xylazine, an animal tranquilizer commonly used by veterinarians that is not legal for human use and which has been found in an increasing number of fatal drug overdoses over the years.
Data from the state’s department of public health show that there were 239 fatal overdoses involving xylazine through November in 2023. In all of 2022, there were 353.
The tranquilizer, or “tranq” by its street name, is a non-opioid sedative that is often mixed with fentanyl, a type of opioid. While opioid overdose-reversing medication such as naloxone could reverse the effects of fentanyl, it won’t hinder xylazine’s impact.
Xylazine was present in over a fourth, 26.4%, of all fentanyl-related deaths in the state from 2021 to the middle of 2022. This share was the second-highest across the country. The drug is increasingly present across the entire Northeast, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention.
CDC data show that in January 2019, xylazine was found in fentanyl related deaths 2.9% of the time. Three and a half years later, in June of 2022, the share increased to 10.9%. In absolute numbers, the month of January in 2019 saw 12 of those types of deaths while June 2022 saw 188.
Xylazine isn't just mixed with fentanyl. It has been mixed with heroin and cocaine, among other illegal drugs, and when looking at all those xylazine-related deaths, Connecticut is still one of the hardest hit, having the second-highest xylazine-related death rate in the country. Connecticut had about nine deaths for every 100,000 residents in 2022, right behind Vermont at 10.5. In raw numbers, Connecticut had about 350 xylazine-related deaths that year; Vermont had 68. The data comes from a study published last month by researchers at Arizona State University who found 2022 xylazine-related death information for 18 states with readily available data.
“During the process of searching for information on xylazine-involved overdose deaths in different states, it seemed that Connecticut was one of the states with the most data available online,” said the lead researcher, Dr. Manuel Cano, in a statement to The Connecticut Mirror. “In contrast to Connecticut, there are other states that do not currently provide public data on xylazine-involved overdose deaths or that do not uniformly test for xylazine in post-mortem toxicology.”
Dr. Cano and his team also analyzed data from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency regarding lab chemistry results of substances secured from law enforcement during drug seizures.
In 2022, xylazine was found in 7% of drug seizures submitted to labs for testing in Connecticut, the second-highest share in the country and an increase from 1.8% in 2019. When taking population into account, the xylazine drug report rate in Connecticut in 2022 was almost 7 per 100,000 residents, the fifth-highest in the country.
Researchers acknowledged limitations in their data, including that not every drug seized by law enforcement is sent to a lab for analysis and that the dosage or quantity of the seized drug isn’t taken into account in the data, which is why they computed both rates and shares.
