The most well-known example of this was the "paralysis" of a number of IV drug users in the late 70s/early 80s. They had all fallen mysteriously ill after injecting a homemade heroin mimic known as MPPP that was contaminated with another substance called MPTP.
The first case occurred in a grad student gone wrong who was producing MPPP for his own use. Three days after injecting himself with it, he developed severe Parkinson's-like symptoms, which were successfully treated with l-dopa. A little more than a year later, he died of an overdose and was autopsied, and the doctors discovered that his little homebrew experiment had stripped a section of his brain of most of its dopamine neurons. Later cases would further bear this out, resulting in a paper in Science and a fascinating book. This accident proved to be a huge boon for Parkinson's research, as the natural and chemical forms of the disease are practically indistinguishable. If you want more information, there's a good article available in Wired about one of the people affected by MPTP.
Not every case of adulteration turns out to be so useful to science. More recently, another outbreak of Parkinson's-like symptoms was investigated in IV users of methcathinone (cat), a chemical cousin of methamphetamine's.
Meth and cat are both most commonly produced from the same starting material, pseudoephedrine. Meth is made by reducing pseudoephedrine using lithium in ammonia, while cat is produced by oxidation, most commonly with the lovely purple potassium permanganate (KMnO4).
Back in the day when chemistry sets were still fun, there was a little kit you could buy that contained tubes of potassium permanganate and glycerin. Mixing them would result in a slight delay, then the mixture would hiss, smoke, and burst into flame. I don't think they sell them anymore.
But I digress.
Anyway, perhaps unsurprisingly, this preparation isn't always done properly, and contains leftover manganese. Chronic manganese exposure leads to dopaminergic damage, and the patients exhibit some of the same symptoms as the MPTP-contaminated Californians.
"IV users in strange and exotic places? Bah! Not my problem." You may be saying this right now. I'll never know. I might not even know who you are.
Well, not even you gateway users are safe. Lead poisoning is a pretty damn rare affliction these days, so it was probably pretty confusing when almost 30 young people in good health showed up at German hospitals with severe heavy metal poisoning.
How'd they figure it out? Well,
After 8 weeks, we detected a common pattern: the patients were young, were unemployed or were students, had a history of smoking, and had body piercings.
Pierced? Young? Unemployed? They must be toking up, puffing the magic dragon, getting baked, toasted, blazed, stoned, enjoying a sweet 420. It's like... science, man.
I'm sorry, what were we talking about?
Oh, right.
So, eventually the doctors got them to own up, and had some of them bring in a "sample" for "research."
It didn't take them long to figure out what the problem was, as the weed had been "salted" with lead (picture). Some dedicated capitalist had made the connection between lead and mass, and was cheating his customers by artificially increasing the weight of his product.
The current working hypothesis of the police is that because of its high specific gravity and inconspicuous grayish color, lead was used to increase the weight of street marijuana sold by the gram and thereby to maximize profits among dealers. In the material that was obtained, the lead content on average was 10% by weight, which translates into a profit increase of approximately1,000 ($1,500.00) per kilogram of marijuana.
Considering that a kilogram of pot runs about $2000 (according to the US DOJ), that's a whopping 133% increase in profit.
So, we can't trust toys from China, spinach from California, beef from Europe, and now, even our cherished local pharmacologists are trying to their customers for a buck. Is there no end to this madness?
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