Authorities in Argentina reported at least 20 people dead and more than 74 seriously affected by having consumed adulterated cocaineapparently mixed with opiates, in events all concentrated in the northwestern suburbs of Buenos Aires.
People began to get sick and even die in their homes and on the streets of these poor neighborhoods. The majority of seriously ill patients with this mass intoxication for adulterated cocaine in Argentina are hospitalized in eight health centers in that area of the province of Buenos Aires.
People affected by consuming this adulterated cocaine They presented signs of respiratory distress and violent convulsions, according to what witnesses and relatives of the dead revealed: “I found him lying on the floor. Bad, very bad, he hardly breathed, with his eyes back,” Beatriz Mercado told AFP, who found her 31-year-old son lying in the kitchen and took him to the hospital.
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🚨 #Argentina The Province of Buenos Aires issues an epidemiological alert for intoxication due to the consumption of adulterated cocaine that has left at least 17 dead and more than 50 hospitalized pic.twitter.com/QsBn1Yjaph
– Gabriela Frías (@gfrias) February 2, 2022
The sick from this massive intoxication are in eight hospitals in the north and west of Greater Buenos Aires. For his part, the Buenos Aires security secretary, Sergio Berni, explained that “every street drug dealer who buys cocaine, breaks it down (yields it). Some do it with non-toxic substances, such as starch. Others put hallucinogens in it and if there is no control, these things happen,” he told AFP.
What was adulterated cocaine in Argentina
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Several hypotheses are handled in this regard: apparently it would have opiates (heroin particles) which is why its snorted consumption makes it deadly. The head of toxicology at the Fernandez Hospital in Buenos Aires, Carlos Damin, said that he “had never seen anything like this” and that “at least we started with 30 percent adulterant.”
There are also versions that the fact would have been intentional, as a settling of scores between dealers and micro-trafficking gangs.
San Martin’s attorney general, Marcelo Lapargo, described the incident as “absolutely exceptional.”
“People say that this happens in Central America or in other places, but (here) the truth is never. It may be a reckoning, but it is conjectural because we have no history,” he told AFP.
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