Narcan-resistant xylazine, often mixed with other drugs, found in South Bend 

SOUTH BEND, Ind.--Xylazine, an animal tranquilizer-turned street drug, made its way to Michiana.

The St. Joseph County Police served a warrant Friday when they found over a pound of drugs suspected to include xylazine. The sedative, sometimes called "tranq," does not respond to Narcan, the overdose-reversing drug, making it especially dangerous.

Now that they know it's in our community, police want folks on high alert, saying this is the largest quantity of xylazine they've ever seen in this area. The suspect identified and arrested Friday was found with more than a pound of a suspected combination of cocaine and xylazine.

"You may think you're buying, say, for example, cocaine, but in fact, it contains three or four other [drugs], it could contain fentanyl, it could contain xylazine," said Capt. Joseph Focosi from the St. Joseph County Warrants Division. "What [xylazine] does is it mimics an opioid."

"Xylazine itself is very unusual to find. So it is not really the deadliness of xylazine, it is the mixture of xylazine with the other drugs," said Joanne Cogdell.

To learn more, ABC57's Annie Kate met up with Joanne Cogdell, the CEO of Naxos Neighbors.

"Naxos Neighbors is a harm reduction technology company," Cogdell said. "We do training, we do consulting, and we also have our app, Naxos OD. And the purpose of the app is to provide those services to people who use drugs."

She said they do "drug checking" with the University of Notre Dame, studying the local drug supply to find out what substances are on the market.,

"We've been doing drug checking in South Bend since 2023, and we observed xylazine at that time," Cogdell said. "

"It's relatively cheap," Focosi said. "So, drug dealers can add it to substances to double their profits."

Friday, St. Joseph County Police found 35-year-old Ashley Ann Wardlow with suspected xylazine, while serving a warrant on other drug charges on Marietta Street in South Bend.

"To discover an amount like that of suspected xylazine or any drug, any drug in that amount is a large amount. You're talking about a pound," Focosi said.

Wardlow now sits behind bars, facing new drug possession charges, and officials are sounding the alarm over the dangerous street drug.

What makes xylazine so terrifying is the widely available overdose-reversing drug Narcan only works on opioids. It does not work on xylazine. Still, it's the best first line of defense that we have right now.

"We always recommend using [Narcan] because the chances that an opioid is in there is pretty high," Cogdell said.

Otherwise, the best defense is harm reduction.

"We also do harm reduction supply delivery," Cogdell said. "So, relevant here is that we do have test strips for xylazine. So if you are using unregulated drugs and you want to see if xylazine is in it, you can test that drug with a xylazine test strip right before you use it."

"Educate them," Focosi said, "to at least use some of these tools in our arsenal, these test strips, things like that, just to be safe."

And while police are sounding the alarm about what they say is an emerging drug, others are concerned about new substances on the market.

"We've recently not been finding xylazine, which is a trend across the country that xylazine has begun to disappear. And in its place has been the tranquilizer medetomidine, which we have concerns might be in our area," Cogdell said. "It is way more potent than xylazine."

Focosi tells ABC57 medetomidine is not yet on police's radar in St. Joseph County.

He also called for regulations on drugs like xylazine. While the Office of National Drug Control Policy officially designated the combination of xylazine and fentanyl an emerging threat, the drug is not classified under the Controlled Substances Act.

The Naxos OD app is free, and more information can be found here: https://www.naxosod.com/for-users