Patricia R. Doxsey reports in the Daily Freeman that xylazine, a powerful veterinary sedative, is showing up regularly in overdoses in Ulster County. Ulster County Health Commissioner Dr. Carol Smith said, “It’s not a new drug per se.... But it’s something we’re just starting to hear more and more about.” The drug is called “tranq” or “tranq dope,” and is a central nervous system depressant that can cause drowsiness and amnesia, can slow breathing and the heart rate, and can cause blood pressure to drop to dangerously low levels. Vets have used it on animals since 1972, but it is not approved for human use. “Xylazine is making the deadliest drug threat our country has ever faced, fentanyl, even deadlier,” U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency Administrator Anne Milgrim said in a March 20 public safety alert. On March 26, New York Senator Chuck Schumer said, "I am asking the DEA, which has just issued the alert, to focus on stopping Xylazine, this evil drug in New York City. The DEA has diversion control teams. They are agents in law enforcement, but they're also chemists and other kinds of doctors, and they can swoop in on an area and deal with a drug problem." In Ulster County, toxicology reports showed the presence of xylazine in two of the 66 opioid-related deaths in Ulster County in 2020 and four of the 71 opioid overdoses in 2021, and ten in 2022. The drug is especially dangerous because as a sedative and not an opioid, Narcan will not reverse the effects of xylazine. Ulster County Sheriff Juan Figueroa said, “We definitely know it’s out there, it’s just a matter of detecting it.... We are talking about it and we’re going to definitely talk about it more in the future because it’s an issue that people need to know about.” While Schumer is proposing legislation on the federal level, in Albany state Sen. James Skoufis introduced legislation last week to designate xylazine as a schedule III depressant-controlled substance, which he said would make its possession a crime. Read the full story in the Daily Freeman.