![]() ![]() ![]() “I got tired of weed and for a minute wet was cool, it was something new, it was a good way to escape.” Getting high on PCP, however, was nothing like smoking pot. “PCP users can be so psychotic when they’re brought in that they can’t provide any history,” says one doctor. Bored with his usual weed high, Nelly saw wet as a change of pace. He says that for years prior to smoking his first dipper, he consumed a heavy daily diet of potent blunt-wrapped weed, the same stuff that most Philly dealers smoke from sundown to sunup while working the corner. ![]() He first got into the drug while hustling crack almost 10 years ago when he was in his early twenties, and kept smoking until he was nearly 30. Nelly, a former wet user, explains in his gruff voice that he started smoking wet when he was “a young bull”-an up and comer in the West Philadelphia drug scene. In parts of Philly, PCP use is back to peak levels, and the associated social costs are piling up. ![]() After a steep and prolonged drop in the number of young people trying the drug in the ‘90s, numbers of new users are climbing again. To the increasing number of kids now smoking it, PCP induces a psychotic state with symptoms that resemble schizophrenia. “You don’t see too many older users because of the kinds of effects it can have.”Įffects like psychosis and other severe mental health symptoms. “It’s definitely a drug that appeals to younger users, people mostly in their teens and 20s,” says Jackson. These days, PCP comes dissolved in an oily yellow tincture called “wet.” Dealers soak crushed mint leaves in wet and sell them in dime bags, or dip cigarettes in it (called “dippers”) and sell them ready to smoke. He says the powdered PCP called angel dust that partnered with drugs like crack and heroin to ravage the city in the late ‘70s and ‘80s is gone from the streets. Lieutenant Charles Jackson has been in the Narcotics Unit of the Philadelphia Police department for 15 years. These patients, many of them teens, are early adopters in what law enforcement authorities and mental health professionals worry is the beginning of a surge in PCP use, spawned by a convenient new way of consuming the powerful drug: by dissolving it in liquid and soaking cigarettes with it so that it can be smoked on the fly. By morning light, some of them will be strapped to gurneys in inpatient psych units, wards of the city’s Crisis Response Centers-psychiatric emergency rooms acting as triage units for the homicidal and suicidal. They’re advertising to a specific kind of customer, one who’s not here to cop heroin or coke (though those are available in abundance if they want them), a customer who’s looking, instead, to get “wetted up.” These are customers who want a high that includes hallucinations and, not infrequently, a psychotic episode. ![]()
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