Toronto Sun reports:

NEW YORK — DJ AM died accidentally from a lethal cocktail of prescription drugs and cocaine, the medical examiner’s office ruled Tuesday.

The toxicology report showed the 36-year-old had in his system cocaine, OxyContin, Hydrocodone or Vicodin, antianxiety drugs Xanax and Ativan, Klonopin which also controls anger, Benadryl, and Levamisole, a drug apparently used to cut cocaine.

Now, that’s a hell of a lot of drugs to have in your system at one time, I don’t care who you are, but the one that jumped out at me was the levamisole. I remembered reading about it a while back, but couldn’t remember why it was dangerous. From the AP:

The medication called levamisole … can be used in humans to treat colorectal cancer, but it severely weakens the body’s immune system, leaving patients vulnerable to fatal infections.

Scientific studies suggest levamisole might give cocaine a more intense high, possibly by increasing levels of dopamine, the brain’s “feel-good” neurotransmitters.

Interesting. Gives the user a yummy dopamine rush, but also makes them susceptible to fatal infections. According to the article, levamisole is supposedly being cut in before importation, so it’s hard for users, or even dealers, to know whether their stuff has been cut with it.

Now, let’s consider when something like this happens with a legal good. Remember the melamine in baby-food imported from China? What about diethylene glycol in toothpaste? What about good old yummy lead paint? With legal goods, a regulatory or overseeing body detects the tainted product, blocks the importation, and notifies consumers which products should be avoided. The supplier could smuggle the product in, but that would dramatically increase the price, and anyway, everybody knows their stuff is tainted, so nobody would want it. In most cases, the supplier chooses to remove the offending toxin because importing stuff legally is much cheaper and easier than importing stuff illegally.

On the black market, of course, different forces apply. A black-market supply chain is necessarily long, convoluted, and opaque. There’s no way to tell where the stuff you’re getting came from. There’s no way to tell if it’s tainted, and if you do find out that it’s tainted there’s no way to tell whether any other batch is any better. Given how expensive, risky, and difficult-to-acquire prohibition makes drugs, you’re more likely to take your chances even if you do know the stuff is tainted. Given these conditions, producers can hardly be held accountable for cutting their products with toxic chemicals. There is a strong motivation to use adulterants, even if they have medium or long-term health effects.

As usual, The Man takes the wrong message home from this situation:

The tainted cocaine has received only limited attention in the U.S., though federal authorities are monitoring its use, said Paul Knierim, a DEA spokesman in Washington.

“I think the message is the same: Don’t use cocaine, it’s a dangerous drug,” Knierim said.

Well, actually, it sounds to me like levamisole is the dangerous drug. Nobody looked at the Chinese baby food, tooth paste, or lead-painted toys and concluded that baby food, tooth paste, and toys were dangerous. What makes cocaine particularly dangerous is the system of prohibition that encourages producers to taint it and prevents regulatory bodies from quickly detecting the contamination, containing it, and notifying the public.