A horror drug said to be sweeping America left one woman’s flesh “rotting” so badly she said she had to cut her own skin off in a macabre self-surgery.
Tracey McCann, 39, started taking xylazine - a powerful sedative normally used to tranquilise large animals - after a car crash which nearly took her life.
She suffered from chronic pain but ended up developing an addiction from the opioids which led to xylazine - and her flesh turning black.
Xylazine is said to be sweeping the US and has led to users watching in terror as their own flesh rots from the inside out.
This has led to people amputating their own limbs as around 3,000 people a year are said to have died from overdoses.
Now, the first death attributed to the drug in the UK has been recorded, after Karl Warburton, 48, from Solihull, West Midlands, passed away in May 2022.
A postmortem found heroin, fentanyl and cocaine in his system, as well as xylazine.
Tracey was homeless in Kensington, Philadelphia, US - which has been described as the “ground zero” of the drug - when her addiction to xylazine became a "living nightmare".
When offered heroin by an acquaintance, she took it as she "saw no other way to cope" and she became hooked on heroin and fentanyl.
“Around Covid the effects of fentanyl started changing,” Tracey said.
“Drug dealers were sneaking in xylazine. When I took it, it was knocking me straight out for four or five hours.
“Me and everyone around me using just thought it was strong fentanyl."
Tracey was managing a Domino's Pizza joint up until September 10, 2009, when she was in a horror car crash which left her brain damaged.
She survived the crash but was in a coma for a month and was left with chronic pain - which saw doctors prescribed her opioids.
While the pills helped her pain, she became heavily addicted to them and was dependent by the time doctors stopped her prescription.
She then developed an addiction to xylazine - also known as ‘tranq’.
The side effects of the drugs are not widely known, but for Tracey they became like something from horror film.
She said: “I was injecting the drugs. It wasn't until five or six months after I was using it, that I started getting these wounds.
“I would get these bruises at night and my skin would turn black I didn’t know what was going on, I didn’t show anyone, I just covered it up.
“Then one day I saw another woman in Kensington. She had same bruises and blackened skin as me."
Tracey spoke to the woman, who told her that she too was using the drug, and that the side effects were due in part from meat tenderiser that is cut with the drugs.
“I never thought I could get clean," Tracey said.
“One day my blood started clotting. My boyfriend at the time brought me to hospital.
“I did a blood test and was septic and needed an immediate blood transfusion
“Lots of people I knew had gone septic from the drug too. But I could tell the doctor and nurse were judging me like I was a worthless junkie. I ripped IV out and left hospital."
Tracey then resorted to self-surgery and began cutting off her own dead skin.
“I would wake up crying in pain and the only way to make it go away was to cut it off," she said.
“I don't recommend it to anyone. One time I accidentally cut a tendon in my arm, and now I can’t move fingers a certain way.”
Dropping to just six stone, Tracey decided to go to St Louis, Missouri, in a desperate attempt to get off the drug.
A spot came up, allowing her to join and she spent 45 days in rehab before moving into a sober living community.
Describing her withdrawals from the drug, she said she had seizures and double vision and symptoms that lasted four months.
But she’s now been completely clean since September 4, and is reassuring others that it is possible to get off the horror drug.
She said: "It’s going to be hard - you have to want it extremely bad. The withdrawal is like no other but there is a way out.
"I am so grateful to have been given the scholarship to get into rehab.
"The government needs to draw up an effective protocol for this, otherwise things are going to get so much worse.
"I am just taking one day at a time, but I am so glad to be alive."
