Liam Payne death: Pink cocaine isn't cocaine, so what's in the mystery drug?

There is concern about a relatively new drug that has entered the party drug scene in the United States and Europe. The drug is pink cocaine and is in the news following the death of One Direction singer Liam Payne. Pink cocaine is pink, but it is not cocaine, and experts are concerned because no one is sure what is in the drug mix and in what proportions. It is a mysterious drug with unpredictable results and a long-term risk of addiction.

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

According to ABC News and TMZ, initial toxicology reports indicate this 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.

Police have reportedly found pink cocaine 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 color from the pink food coloring used in it. Other than color, nothing else is a standard for the drug. It varies from batch to batch depending on what the underground chemist mixed and in what proportion.

Pink cocaine is usually sold as powder and snorted and originated in Latin America in the 1970s. According to The Irish Star, it experienced a revival in Colombia around 2010, spread to Latin America and reached Europe.

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

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

According to Palmar, several drug testing studies have found that most pink cocaine samples contain primarily ketamine, often in combination with MDMA (ecstasy), methamphetamine and opioids and/or new psychoactive substances. Some samples may contain small amounts of cocaine.

“Ketamine is going to dethrone ecstasy very soon, and Tusi is really going to take it to the extreme,” Palamar told The New York Times.

Most pink cocaine samples contain at least one stimulant and one depressant.

Ketamine: A powerful anesthetic with dissociative, sedative and hallucinogenic properties. Ketamine abuse can cause 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 mild psychedelic properties, often associated with feelings of euphoria and increased energy.

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

What worries Palmar is that users who expect a purely stimulant effect from cocaine could end up getting 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,” Palmar writes in his research paper.

So what does pink cocaine do to a user?

“Depends on what’s actually in it… and that makes it unpredictable. If a batch contains a lot of meth, sympathomimetic effects can occur. If another batch contains a lot of ketamine, hallucinations/psychomotor changes etc. may occur,” explains Josh Trebach, a famous medical toxicologist.

Experts say it's the mystery surrounding the pink powder's contents and the unpredictability of what it might do to a user that makes it the worst drug. Only the underground chemist knows what is contained in the batch of pink cocaine. The dealers don't know what they're selling and the users don't know what they're selling. Drug enforcement agencies around the world now have to contend with a mysterious pink powder.