Holy shit! Take care of yourselves, folks. Maybe find something else to party with for a while. We all know it's fun, but it's not worth ending up in the hospital or ending up dead!

if only ketamine weren't so expensive up here...

Really? You can buy crack in Greenlake? Weird.

Damn. There goes my plan to replace FourLoko's role in my life with Burbon'n'Coke.

...don't look at me like that.

Makes me really, really happy that the last time I did coke was 1985.

I know this is not what is actually happening, but if someone were trying to get people to stop doing a certain drug, this would be a very effective strategy.

It's like a few years ago, when I was watching a special on bush meat and some activists who were trying to stop the practice of eating certain endangered animals. My comment was that they could save a heck of a lot of time/money by finding the source/supply/distributors, and contaminating the meat so that it made people sick. People would learn pretty quickly that bush meat = illness (completely unethical and illegal to do this, of course, but it would certainly be effective).

@7 - Isn't bush meat wild be definition? There is no central source to contaminate, which is why stopping it is so difficult...

@7 - Except that those doctors who report levamisole poisoning on a weekly basis are also seeing "frequent flyers."

"It could kill you" has rarely been a powerful stopping force in the war on drugs.

@8 Yes, but, in this special I was watching, they talked about how the meat was brought to market. They specifically showed a distributor with a truck piled high with dead animals destined for a local market... that image is what prompted me to make the comment -- all of those animals in one place. I don't know how one would actually go about contaminating the meat (presumably, a truck full of bush meat is worth a bunch of money so they guard it heavily), it was just an idle thought about how that would be more effective than any educational campaigns or anti-poaching efforts.

In the same way, levamisole may do what years of Just Say No and the war on drugs couldn't (at least temporarily)...

@9 Maybe for some drugs "it could kill you" isn't effective. But, powder cocaine is a little different... especially when we're talking about a 92% contamination rate, I think that may deter a large number of recreational users. Just my opinion...

@3, never been to Beth's, then?

There could be some selection bias elevating these results- people being more likely to send on results if they are positive. But it would have to be a hell of a bias, far larger than is likely, for these results to mean anything other than heavy levamisole contamination of Seattle's cocaine supply.

But at least with the the kit, people will KNOW that they have been exposed to levamisole. Otherwise, most people will assume their coke is levamisole free.

And if they know, they can watch for symptoms. If you catch it early, levamisole toxicity is easy to treat. But delay treatment, and people end up in the ICU or worse.