This ‘opioid cocktail’ blends heroin or fentanyl or one of their analogues with sedatives including xylazine. Tranq or tranq dope is increasingly common on the east coast in the United States. In fact, in British Colombia, benzo dope was responsible for 30% of all overdose deaths.

This makes benzo dope significantly more harmful than “pure” heroin and fentanyl, despite the fact that pure heroin and fentanyl now make up less than 10% of the available supply of drugs. This puts them at higher risk of personal harm as well as at increased risk of violence and sexual violence.

For example, a person heavily sedated on benzos can walk into traffic, off of stairs without walking down them, or pass out on the street. A blood test can take days to process, meaning emergency rooms won’t always know what they’re treating until it’s too late.īenzodiazepines are also more sedative, that means heavy users are more likely to be sedated into presenting a danger to themselves. Instead, many people go into overdose, the Naloxone does nothing, and the individual starts to go into opioid withdrawal while still suffering from the benzodiazepine overdose. Plus, traditional opioid overdose reversal drugs like Naloxone have no effect on benzodiazepine overdose. For example, while an opioid overdose normally lasts 10-20 minutes, benzodiazepine overdoses can last for hours.

Largely, they greatly increase the risk of overdose and cause a separate type of overdose than opioids. While benzodiazepines are often issued as a prescription drug, they interact with opioids in new and unexpected ways. In addition, most samples contained other drugs, with caffeine, Flualprazolam (a benzodiazepine), Bromazolam (a benzodiazepine), etizolam (a benzodiazepine analogue), and xylazine (a sedative used on horses) being the most common. While not yet extremely common in the United States, benzo dope represents more than half of all fentanyl samples brought into Toronto’s free drug testing sites. Benzo dope is a mix of benzodiazepines, which are a tranquilizer that effect the body-regulating GABA system of the brain, and an opioid – namely heroin or fentanyl.

Benzo overdose antidote