What's Actually in Your Cocaine? The Truth About the Street Supply

You think you know what's in the bag. You don't. Nobody buying on the street does — not really. You're trusting that a white powder handed through a car window, after passing through however many hands, is the thing you paid for. It almost never is, not fully.

I'm Gary. I'm a cocaine addiction specialist, and I'm in long-term recovery myself. I want to be clear about why I'm writing this, because it's the opposite of what you might expect. I'm not writing it to scare you, and I'm definitely not writing it to tell you how to test your gear so you can carry on using "safely." I'm writing it because once you actually see what's in most street cocaine, the phrase "it's just a bit of coke" quietly falls apart. You're not buying cocaine. You're buying a mixture — and you don't get a say in the recipe.

There's no such thing as "pure" street cocaine

Here's the first honest thing. Even when purity is high — and by historical standards, EU drug-monitoring data says cocaine purity across Europe has been near record levels in recent years — that's an average across seizures. It tells you nothing about the specific bag in your pocket. The same "gram," from the same dealer, can be strong one week and mostly filler the next.

That unpredictability isn't a footnote — it is the danger. Your body can't calibrate a dose to a mystery. The reason people overdose isn't usually that they suddenly took more; it's that this batch was nothing like the last one. And the question is never really "is it cut?" It always is. The only question is "cut with what?" — and that's where it gets ugly.

What street cocaine is actually cut with

These aren't rare horror stories. This is the ordinary contents of ordinary bags.

• Levamisole — a cattle and sheep dewormer. This is the big one. European studies have found levamisole in roughly half of the cocaine seizures analysed in Ireland, and in the majority of samples in some other countries. It is not harmless filler. It can wipe out the white blood cells that fight infection (a condition called agranulocytosis), trigger inflammation of the blood vessels, and cause patches of skin — classically on the ears, nose and cheeks — to literally die and blacken. Women appear to be hit harder. This is the dewormer that leaves people with holes in their skin.
• Phenacetin — a painkiller banned decades ago because it was linked to cancer and kidney failure. One analysis found it in nearly half of street cocaine samples. It's in there because it looks the part.
• Benzocaine and lidocaine — local anaesthetics. They numb your gums and mouth the same way cocaine does, so a heavily cut bag still "feels" real when you rub it on your gums. Read that again: you're being sold the numbness instead of the drug.
• Boric acid, creatine, caffeine, sugars, even laundry powder — cheap bulking agents to pad the weight. Boric acid is used in ant and rodent killer.

So before we even get to the truly deadly part, look at what's already there: a dewormer, a banned carcinogenic painkiller, an anaesthetic, and pesticide filler. Nobody agreed to any of that. It just came in the bag.

The new danger in Ireland: fentanyl and nitazenes

This is the part that has changed everything, and it's why I couldn't stay quiet about it. Since late 2023 the HSE has been running national red alerts after clusters of overdoses. The culprits are nitazenes — synthetic opioids, some of them stronger than fentanyl — which first turned up in fake benzodiazepine tablets and in heroin, and which the HSE has warned can now appear in coloured powders too.

Here's the nightmare of it: these substances are lethal at doses you cannot see. A contaminated bag doesn't look different, doesn't smell different, doesn't taste different. People have stopped breathing believing they'd taken one thing when it was quietly laced with another. When the HSE ran drug-checking at Irish festivals, they found pills sold as one drug that contained none of it at all, alongside the strongest ever recorded here — the same wild unpredictability runs straight through the powder market.

And Ireland has the second-highest rate of cocaine use among young adults in the entire EU. That's an enormous number of people quietly rolling this dice, most weekends, with no idea the odds have changed.

You cannot tell by looking — and home kits won't save you

People convince themselves they can tell good gear from bad — the look of it, the taste, the "freeze" on the gums. You can't. Benzocaine is added precisely to fake that freeze. The numbness you're reading as quality might be the adulterant, not the cocaine.

And the testing kits people ask me about have real limits. Home reagent kits and fentanyl strips don't measure purity or dose. They can miss fentanyl entirely when it's clustered in one corner of a bag — testing a pinch from the "clean" end gives a false all-clear. Worst of all, they hand out false reassurance: a "pass" that makes someone feel safe when they're anything but. The only testing that genuinely knows what's in a sample is lab-grade — the kind the HSE runs behind the scenes at festivals, not a strip you dip at a kitchen table.

So I'm not going to tell you to buy a better kit. The honest answer to "what's in this?" is the whole point of this article: you don't know, you can't know, and neither does the person who sold it to you.

Why I'm telling you all this (and it isn't to make you test)

Here's the reframe I really want you to sit with. When people imagine quitting cocaine, they picture giving up cocaine — the thing they think they enjoy. But look again at what's actually in the bag: a dewormer, a withdrawn painkiller, an anaesthetic, some pesticide filler, and an unknown chance of an opioid that can switch your breathing off. That isn't a treat. It was never "just coke."

You're not really choosing to take cocaine at all. You're outsourcing a chemistry experiment to a stranger whose only goal is to make more money per gram — and running it on your own brain and heart. Seeing that clearly is one of the most useful things that can happen to anyone caught in this, because it quietly moves the question from "how do I cut down?" to "why am I letting them do this to me at all?"

What to actually do with this

If it's someone you love who uses, one genuinely useful thing is to keep an eye on the HSE's real-time drug warnings (published at drugs.ie) — bad-batch and contamination alerts go out publicly and fast. That's information that can save a life without pretending any of it is safe.

And if you've recognised yourself in this — if the truth about what you're actually putting in your body has landed — then the real answer was never a test. It's to stop playing the lottery altogether. A good, low-pressure first step is to look honestly at where you stand: my guide to whether you're addicted to cocaine is written for exactly that. If the physical side worries you, I've written plainly about what cocaine does to your heart and whether your nose heals when you stop. You don't have to be certain to reach out — you just have to be willing to look.

You never agreed to take a dewormer, a banned painkiller and a coin-flip on fentanyl. But that's the bag. The only real way to know what's in your cocaine is to stop needing to ask.

I collect this information — the alerts, the trends, what's turning up in Ireland — and I take it seriously, because the more clearly people see what's really on the street, the harder it is to keep pretending it's under control. That clarity has started more than a few recoveries. It could start yours.

Gary Clinton

Ireland's cocaine addiction specialist — CBT-qualified therapist, bestselling author of Never Give Up, and in long-term recovery himself. Private one-to-one help for professionals, online and worldwide.