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But one night last year, the 35-year-old disappeared into the bathroom of a Miami-area group home. A roommate discovered her lifeless body 15 minutes later.
Heroin didn’t kill Webber. Fentanyl did. But the Medical Examiner’s Office ruled she also died from xylazine — the potent animal tranquilizer known as “tranq” that’s become notorious nationwide for causing deep stupors and rotting flesh wounds that sometimes lead to amputations. Authorities said a third substance also helped kill her: meclonazepam, a drug with anti-anxiety properties developed to treat parasitic worms.
Webber’s death reflects the growing toll of fentanyl-tranquilizer mixes in the United States, where more than 3,000 people died of xylazine-related overdoses in 2021 — triple the fatalities recorded the previous year. It’s also evidence of the evolving and unpredictable nature of the nation’s drug supply, dominated by fentanyl, but mixed with an ever-morphing array of synthetic substances that drug dealers use to stretch their supplies. Many of those substances, like xylazine, pose their own health dangers and complicate efforts to reverse overdoses.
Those working to stop overdoses say that tracking what’s in street drugs is a frustrating game of whack-a-mole.
“It’s xylazine now. It could be something else tomorrow,” said Ryan McNeil, a public health and medicine professor at Yale University. “That’s the reality of the volatility of the drug supply.”
Webber’s family suspects she had no clue that her final hit of drugs contained xylazine or fentanyl. Investigators never determined if all three compounds were combined in a pill or a baggie of powder.
Her brother, Kurt Webber, 53, who battles opioid addiction himself, blames her death on the “trash market” of illegal drugs. He lives in Palmyra, Pa., over an hour outside Philadelphia, where xylazine has emerged as a way for drug dealers to extend their supplies of fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that in 2021 killed over 70,000 people in the United States.
“It’s all designed to kill — this fentanyl, this xylazine, and all these other little spinoff drugs,” Kurt Webber said.
Researchers say that fentanyl, which has largely replaced heroin in many markets, is powerful but fast acting. The xylazine gives it “legs,” extending the feeling of sedation by slowing one’s heart rate, breathing and blood pressure. Many users don’t realize their drugs contain xylazine, which can knock them out and make them susceptible to falls, robberies or rapes. Because it is not an opioid, xylazine does not respond to naloxone, the drug commonly used to revive people who are overdosing from opioids.
Xylazine, for now, isn’t a controlled substance under federal law, although a bipartisan group of lawmakers is proposing tightening regulations and the Food and Drug Administration has moved to crack down on importation.
In Florida, where Webber died, it has been a controlled substance since 2016, giving police authority to arrest those who sell it, although that hasn’t stopped it from proliferating.
The drug is used by veterinarians to sedate animals, particularly cattle and horses, but has never been approved for use by humans. It popped up in illegal drugs in Puerto Rico in the early 2000s, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Over the last five years, it spread to the Northeast, particularly Philadelphia, where it has infiltrated more than 90 percent of street drugs, according to the Center for Forensic Science Research & Education, which posts an online early warning system about the latest drugs.
The DEA says its labs have now detected xylazine in drug seizures in 48 states. The number of xylazine-positive drug samples in the South, including Florida, rose by nearly 200 percent from 2020 to 2021, the agency reported.
It’s unclear how much of the xylazine mixed into illegal fentanyl is diverted from veterinarian stocks, and how much is synthesized by clandestine chemists. The DEA last fall said a kilogram can be purchased from online Chinese suppliers for between $6 and $20, allowing dealers “to reduce the amount of fentanyl or heroin used in a mixture.”
Amber’s brother Kurt — a charismatic former salvage diver who can rattle off details of ancient Spanish wrecks — recalled snorting fentanyl he believes was laced with xylazine while in a local Walmart several months ago. Hours later, his worried girlfriend, Andrea Pullen, found him collapsed in a nearby field, breathing but comatose in subfreezing weather. She managed to wake him up and get him into her car.
“He definitely would have froze to death,” Pullen said.
Others describe the ghastly black-and-purple wounds from prolonged use of “tranq dope.” In Maryland, April Tabor, 42, suffered sores for 13 months from xylazine-laced dope. She received wound care through Voices of Hope Maryland, an addiction support group, but still lost feeling in her left hand from the infected sores. In 2021, she began suffering nausea and fever but it wasn’t from opioid withdrawal.
“I started going septic,” Tabor said. “It took me three times of going to the hospital before I had to accept the fact that my arm was going to have to come off.”
Doctors amputated her infected left arm two inches below her elbow.
Deaths linked to fentanyl and xylazine show just how quickly drug combinations can penetrate illicit markets, surprising law enforcement, health officials and users.
“Testing for xylazine is uneven across the United States, which makes it hard to get the national picture,” Rahul Gupta, director of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, said at a briefing this month as the White House designated the drug combination an “emerging public threat.”
In 2020, the DEA reported 808 overdose deaths nationwide in which xylazine was detected, a number that jumped to over 3,000 in 2021. The deaths remain a small percentage of the over 107,000 U.S. overdose deaths in 2021, although officials acknowledge that not all toxicology departments routinely test for the sedative. When xylazine is identified, forensic pathologists don’t always conclude it contributed to the cause of death. Researchers say the tranquilizer would have to be consumed in large quantities to prove fatal on its own, but admit more research is needed on how it contributes to mortality.
Even in places that routinely screen blood samples for xylazine, like Miami-Dade County, where Webber died, officials express surprise at the spike in overdose deaths tied to the animal sedative. Last year, toxicologist Rocio Potoukian found that between 2015 and 2017, there were only four overdose deaths linked to xylazine. The number jumped to 169 between 2018 and 2022.
“One hundred percent of the cases also involved fentanyl,” Potoukian said.
For users in some parts of the country, more real-time testing is helping stave off fatal xylazine-and-fentanyl overdoses, while ensuring proper wound care and addiction treatment.
At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Street Drug Analysis Lab tests drug samples — sent in from nearly 80 participating programs across 20 states — and posts results to its website, so users can check what compounds are being sold in their communities.
At Voice of Hope Maryland, harm-reduction workers keep a whiteboard with a list of drugs and their dealer stamps. Earlier this month, the board displayed samples marked “BMW,” “Tom Brady” and “Hell Cat” — every one having tested positive for fentanyl and xylazine. One sample, “Monkey Pox,” also contained bromazolam, a “designer” benzodiazepine — in the same class of drugs as the meclonazepam that helped kill Webber in Miami.
“Every few weeks, we’re finding some new adulterant or drug mixing in,” said Ed Sisco, a research chemist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, who works with Voices of Hope; he recently reported that xylazine was present in 80 percent of fentanyl-positive samples taken from residue on empty dope bags and drug paraphernalia collected from Maryland users.
Sisco and chemists at Maryland’s state crime lab have also found another concerning substance mixed with fentanyl — medetomidine, which is used to sedate dogs during surgery.
Another technology is also helping drug users and harm-reduction groups identify xylazine. The Canadian biotech firm BTNX has begun selling xylazine test strips, which cost $2 each, or $100 per pack. “In areas where there is not a lot of xylazine, it will be used as a way to track the emergence and proliferation,” said Alex Krotulski, associate director of the Center for Forensic Science Research & Education, which tested the strips’ effectiveness.
At Miami’s IDEA Exchange, Florida’s first syringe exchange service, staffers this month received their first batch of xylazine test strips, which they hope will enable them to better care for users who show up with tranq’s telltale skin ulcerations.
Hansel E. Tookes III, an infectious-disease doctor at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine who founded the program, said one chronic user in her mid-30s recently lost most of her fingers after they became gangrenous because of xylazine. The tips fell off in what is known as “auto-amputation.”
“It’s horrifying,” Tookes said. “Her life will never be the same.”
In Miami, the test strips are too late for those who have overdosed after ingesting xylazine and fentanyl, including a pharmacy technician and cancer survivor who died after taking a pain pill while partying, and a 45-year-old father found dead in his suburban home.
The overdose of Amber Webber, daughter of a man who won fame for discovering the wreck of a Spanish galleon off the coast of the Dominican Republic, has also raised questions for her family.
Her older half sister, Gretchen Webber-Manzella, 51, recalled Amber had a tumultuous childhood in the Dominican Republic and struggled in school. As a teenager, Amber lived briefly with her older sister in Pennsylvania, displaying erratic behavior.
She was also kind and creative. “She loved my children. She loved to tell them stories and she loved drawing,” Webber-Manzella said. “Whatever they wanted, she would draw it for them.”
Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Webber self-medicated, like many people suffering from mental illness. “She couldn’t handle the pain of her reality,” Webber-Manzella said.
Throughout her 20s and 30s, Webber bounced in and out of rehab facilities in Florida, and tried to get her art career off the ground. Her art features nude women awash in bold hues of red, yellow and purple. Other times, as though reflecting her own struggles, her work was wistful: The sketch of a glum woman, her arms crossed, entitled “Turning Another Page,” was uploaded to her website just weeks before her death.
During those final days, Webber’s life unraveled even further, her family says. She was devastated by the death of her beloved cat, Whistle. She briefly checked into a behavioral health center, then entered a group home in Miami Gardens, where on June 14, 2022, she became panicked because she couldn’t fulfill a prescription that included clonazepam, the anti-anxiety drug, recalled her roommate, Monique Racine.
Later, Webber claimed she was going to a pharmacy. She came back “happy and giddy,” but wasn’t carrying a pharmacy bag, Racine recalled. In hindsight, Racine realized she bought street drugs to hold her over.
“We don’t know if it was powder or a pill,” she said.
Webber retreated to the bathroom for more than 15 minutes, but failed to respond when Racine called out for her. Racine broke down the door and found her roommate on the toilet, slumped over against the shower door. Racine tried CPR to no avail. Paramedics also were unable to revive her.
Her family wonders how Amber’s last dose could have contained fentanyl, xylazine and meclonazepam, a “designer benzo” that is not approved for medical use in the United States but can be purchased online.
Sometimes known as “benzo dope,” the mix of opioids and benzodiazepines slows breathing, heart rate and blood pressure, increasing the possibility of an overdose. Benzodiazepines were linked to 12,499 U.S. overdose deaths in 2021, up from 8,719 in 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s unclear how many of those fatalities involved prescription benzodiazepines, which include drugs such as Xanax and Klonopin.
“We know it’s a very dangerous interaction,” said R. Matthew Gladden, a CDC researcher who has studied the rise of street versions of the drugs.
The Webber family may never know precisely what Amber bought and from whom. Her phone remains locked, her communications with a presumed dealer a mystery. Her last days are detailed only in neatly handwritten journal entries: “You’re gonna fail your way to SUCCESS.”
The art she left behind may fulfill that dream. Her sister shipped all of Webber’s work to Pennsylvania, where the family hopes to exhibit it to raise awareness about the link between mental illness and addiction.
“I’d be very proud,” her father, Burt J. Webber Jr., said about such an exhibit. “It’d be a tribute to Amber and the tragedy of her life, raising awareness of the destruction drugs is causing our mainstream society.”
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