Highly dangerous: Colombia's 'pink cocaine'

Far from cocaine processing laboratories deep in the jungle, Colombia's party drug of choice is being cooked up in any Medellin apartment. Known as "tusibi" or "tusi", this "pink cocaine" has no chemical relation to the coca leaf-based stimulant that is exported by the ton, the AFP news agency reported Tuesday, quoted by France 24.

The "tusi" is a cocktail of various substances, including ketamine, a fast-acting anesthetic that is used both with humans (as a sedative in minor operations) and with animals.

"Each cook manages his own proportions and there are as many recipes as there are cooks in this world," a pharmaceutical chemist to the news agency, while preparing the mixture to sell at parties in Medellín.

His prescription contains mainly ketamine, to which he adds ecstasy and the hallucinogen mescaline. All of these substances are available on the black drug market in Colombia's second-largest city for the equivalent of $180.

Around 15 grams of the pink powder that result from the process sells for about $1,500 on the streets. "It generates states of euphoria as if you were drunk. It generates joy, exaltation," the "tusibi" cook said anonymously.

In other regions, the mixture includes psychiatric drugs from the benzodiazepine family and even opioids, highly addictive painkillers that have killed more than 500,000 people in the United States, Diana Pava, a toxicologist with the National University's Psychoactive Substances Research Group, told AFP.   

Its name is an adaptation of the English 2C-B, a hallucinogen first synthesized in the 1970s in the United States and banned worldwide since 2001.

"This was created as a cocktail trying to mimic the original 2C-B molecule… we simply sought to generate a similar sensation," the chemist said.

Detected by the state Drug Observatory almost a decade ago, "tusi" has infiltrated reggaeton verses and Colombian show business. Earlier this year, model Mara Cifuentes said she was in a rehabilitation center after several months of using the substance. Similarly, actress Yina Calderón admitted that her mother is "addicted".

In his office in Medellín, toxicologist Juan Carlos Sánchez has treated several cases of "psychotic or delirious episodes".

The NGO Acción Técnica Social, which runs a drug-testing program at parties, analyzed 228 samples of "tusibi" throughout 2021. The vast majority was a mixture of ketamine and ecstasy. Around 16% had dangerous opioids.