Staten Island has been alarmingly impacted by the drug Xylazine, with some of the highest rates of overdoses seen from the tranquilizer, leaving members of the local community to conduct damage control.
Over the past few years, Xylazine, a powerful sedative first approved by the FDA as an animal tranquilizer in the 1970’s, has been increasingly mixed into the fentanyl supply to make the synthetic opioid’s effects last longer. The drug, nicknamed “tranq,” is not meant for human use and often causes deadly necrotic (dying skin tissue) wounds and makes overdoses more difficult to counteract with Narcan.
Although the largest total number of fatal overdoses involving the drug occur in the Bronx, Staten Island, the city’s least populated borough, had the highest rate of Xylazine-linked overdoses per capita in both 2022 and 2023, according to the most recently available data collected by the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor through October 2023.
Since the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner began testing in the latter half of 2020, when the animal tranquilizer first appeared in the opioid supply, the borough has experienced the highest rate of Xylazine related overdoses. The drug’s presence across the city grew by over 800% in just one year, from 2020, when Xylazine was detected in 52 deaths, to 2021, when the drug was detected in 429 deaths.
While public health experts have recommended expanding educational campaigns about the drug’s dangers and tools for users to test their supplies, harm reduction initiatives are often met with resistance in the borough’s politically conservative neighborhoods, particularly on the South Shore, THE CITY reported.
Community Health Action, Staten Island’s sole drug-addiction outreach unit run out of a bus, oversees the borough’s only syringe exchange and harm reduction operation, and is the only organization providing Xylazine wound care and test kits on the street.
“There is respect for what we do, but we are largely alone here,” CHASI’s executive director Ericker Onaga told THE CITY.
Stacey Seidenfaden, who also helps run CHASI, told THE CITY she has pivoted to wound care management due to a drastic spike of Xylazine over the past six months. “We are trying to keep people from losing limbs,” she said.
