A woman who became addicted to a "zombie drug" told how it "rotted" her flesh and turned her skin black - which saw her resort to "cutting off" her forearm skin. Tracey McCann, 39, started taking xylazine - an extremely powerful sedative normally used to tranquilize large animals.
She developed an addiction to opioids used to treat her chronic pain following a car crash which almost killed her. Xylazine - which is sweeping the US - has led to people seeing their own flesh rotting from the inside, the amputation of limbs by those affected, while at least 3,000 people per year are believed 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 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 coronavirus >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 restaurant 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. Doctors stopped prescribing the opioids a year after her accident by which time Tracey had become entirely dependent on them.
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.
“Drug addiction is a b****.”
Tracey’s addiction became so bad that she got evicted and became homeless. She said: “After that I was just living to use and using to live.
“I wasn’t eating. I got to my lowest point on September 4, I was 85lbs and thought I either need to do a lethal shot of tranq to end it all or get out."
Having dropped to just six stone, and almost doing almost nothing but injecting and passing out, Tracey decided to try and get off the drug. She said: “There was a four-week waiting list but luckily a spot came up and they said they would take me on for free."
Tracey spent 45 days in rehab before she moved to sober living - a community where recovering addicts live together and try to work through their addictions. Tracey is also taking part in trauma and group therapy.
She says the withdrawal from xylazine is "like nothing else" and is far worse than coming off heroin or fentanyl. I had seizures from it and double vision, which wouldn’t go away," she said.
“The symptoms lasted four months into being clean. I wanted to die they were so bad."
But having been completely clean since September 4, Tracey says 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.”
Tracey has been clean since September 2022. "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."
