Eminent drug expert reveals how popular combination of street drugs can turn ... trends now
Footage of a man gnawing at a severed human leg on the side of a busy street in broad daylight shocked the nation this week - drawing speculation that the national drug crisis is to blame.
Video taken in Wasco, California, shows 27-year-old Rosendo Tellez picking up the leg, seemingly biting it and then waving it around on the sidewalk before police arrived.
Full arrest details have not been made available, but the internet is ablaze with theories about the potential involvement of drugs currently dominating the illicit drug supply, specifically xylazine and fentanyl.
Forensic toxicologist Dr Bruce Goldberger, who worked with police on the two horrific cases in Florida that involved disturbed people eating other’s faces, told DailyMail.com that he understood the instinct to suspect those drugs.
But he said meth, crack cocaine, or bath salts, would actually be the most likely culprits, given that stimulants can bring on a powerful state of psychosis, or total severance from reality, that other drugs like fentanyl, which is a sedative, cannot.
However, if fentanyl is combined with other drugs, it can enhance the effects of them.
Horrified onlookers watched on as the man bent over and sniffed the leg before reportedly biting into it and then waving it around on the streets of Wasco, California
Rosendo Tellez was seen walking down the street, waving the limp severed leg around, carrying it by the foot
According to Dr Goldberger, Tellez’s cannibalistic behavior is not ‘characterized in the medical literature. This is so unusual, so aberrant that it’s not something that could be readily studied.’
He added: ‘When you hear about these cases, sometimes you think immediately if a drug or drugs were involved.’
Stimulants, such as methamphetamine or crack cocaine, for instance, are the most likely class of drugs, Dr Goldberger said.
Bath salts, a type of stimulant drug that people either snort, smoke, or inject, are now infamous for links to two deranged attacks in which people ate others’ faces off.
Dr Goldberger told DailyMail.com that in a psychotic state, eating another's flesh may be seen as necessary for self-defense or survival if the person is convinced they'll starve otherwise.
In this altered state of mind, the
