So-called “pink cocaine”, that is.

The popular club drug is drawing attention for its role in the tragic death of yet another young celebrity — this time, Liam Payne, formerly a member of the popular ‘boy band’, One Direction. Payne’s death at age 31 resulted from a fall off the balcony of his third-floor hotel room in Buenos Aires.

A broad account of the circumstances and the role played by drugs:

Liam Payne had multiple drugs in body at time of death

One of those drugs was the pinkish, sweet-smelling substance that’s our topic today.

According to the National Capital Poison Control Center, what’s commonly sold on the black market as “pink cocaine’ in reality contains little or no genuine cocaine. Instead, it’s a combination of MDMA (Molly), ketamine, and assorted other substances — methamphetamine, benzodiazepines, even caffeine —along with a lesser-known synthetic psychedelic identified as 2-CB.

Developed as a treatment for sexual dysfunction, 2-CB was subsequently dismissed by researchers as unsafe. Nonetheless, 2-CB has now found its way into common use as a recreational drug.

Although characterizing it as potentially dangerous, several of the articles on 2-CB go on to describe it as “less addictive than fentanyl”. Seriously, what drugs aren’t? As opioid addiction goes, fentanyl is the current heavyweight. I suppose science will develop others  to surpass it, but for the moment, it’s fentanyl that’s driving the current overdose totals.

Simply by virtue of its ingredients, we might find pink cocaine described as a stimulant, hallucinogen, or dissociative anesthetic, when it shows up in post-mortem analysis along with whatever else the chemist may have had lying around at the time.

I mean, who else would know the true contents of a particular sample of pink cocaine? Certainly not the user. Who might not care, especially in a club or party environment, where the emphasis is on getting as high as possible, as quickly as you can.

According to early accounts from Argentina, Liam Payne was involved in several incidents shortly before his death. He appeared to be grossly intoxicated at the time, and was drinking heavily along with everything else he was taking.

It was the fall that killed him, but it was the drug and alcohol use that led to the fall.

I wish I didn’t have to ask the question: who’s going to be next?