No, it’s not the lavish lifestyle, the old-school luxury cars or the hold-and-cold running hookers that the Drug Kingpins and I share. It’s something much more basic than that. Something we both need to make our businesses run.
Maybe I should start at the beginning. I’ve written here before about the problems of parasites in sheep and goats. All livestock carry a parasite load all the time, but,as shepherds, we have to make sure we keep it to a minimum to keep the animals healthy and productive. We do this with the careful and sparing use of powerful antithelmintics, also known as both wormers and dewormers.
Because parasites can develop resistances to specific wormers, they are not interchangeable. One must continue to use the drug that works until it doesn’t work anymore. This is new-ish thinking; farmers used to routinely switch back and forth between wormers intentionally, thinking that switching it up kept the worms guessing and prevented resistance from developing. (Actually, they were causing the very problem they were trying to prevent.)
We are currently using a drug called Levamisole, and we use it very, very carefully for two reasons. 1. It’s the end of the line in wormers right now. (There is another drug on the horizon that is in clinical trials but it’s at least a year from the shelves.) and 2. It’s a bit more powerful and dangerous than the other wormers on the market. The margins of error are slim with Levamisole, and it would be easy to poison the sheep while poisoning the worms.
The other problem with Levamisole, the bigger problem, is that it’s hard to get. It was manufactured at a plant in China that was destroyed in the earthquake a few years back and disappeared entirely for a while. (We were using a different wormer at the time, so it didn’t affect us.) It came back on the market about a year and half ago, and I bought a couple of packets to have in reserve, just in case we needed it.
Worming Orion. The medicine is squirted back into the sheep’s throat, to make sure they don’t spit it out.
When we started using it as our wormer, I went online to buy more and couldn’t find it anywhere. All the livestock supply websites had it listed as backordered and kindly offered to email me when it came back in. Weird.
Then, last month, I saw an article about how people were showing up at hospitals with what looked like a flesh-eating virus, but turned out to be a side-effect of snorting cocaine cut with Levamisole. And another. And another. It seems that drug dealers are cutting cocaine with the wormer because Levamisole magnifies the effects of the cocaine and the user is none the wiser that he’s getting less cocaine for his money. UNTIL HIS FLESH STARTS TO ROT OFF.
Yuck
According to the people who monitor these things, 70 to 80 % of the coke on the market is cut with Levamisole! And the drug lords are carefully guarding their sources for Levamisole.
I did manage to find one livestock supply that had a limited amount of Levamisole in stock. They have had to limit to number of packets they sell to each customer, because of the shortage, and told me that the manufacturer promised them more in November. I bought enough to get us through the year, at least, but I’m still worried. Mostly I’m worried that the U.S. government will ban the drug altogether due to it’s off-lable use, but there isn’t much I can do about that.
I find it terribly amusing that I’m competing with drug kingpins to buy enough Levamisole to keep our businesses running. The difference is, if a dealer has to sell his cocaine uncut, he still makes a fabulous, albeit not quite SO fabulous, profit. I don’t even want to think about what will happen if we can’t get Levamisole. It’s just too grim.
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ewww! well, another reason to get folks to give up their coke habit!
Hopefully the goverment will be smart about whatever they decide
Interesting. On the surface, the economics are not quite right–using a limiting reagent to sell a popular street drug. So….who owns the lab(s) making it? Obviously there is a source that produces Levamisole and sells exclusively (or nearly exclusively) to the drug lords.
I am always surprised by the ways people make money.
EWWWW! I think that sums it up.
As former DEA, it’s more likely that you will have to register to purchase the drug or they will limit the amount that you can buy. Kind of like buying cold medicine with pseudoephedrine in it. It can be used to manufacture methamphetamine, so it is now tightly controlled but not completely withdrawn from the market.
Good Lord! I had no idea! What very, very scary news. Fortunately for us, we may be benefiting from the only upside of this terrible heat – dryness. I think it’s keeping the worms at bay for the time being. Time to run another fecal into the vet for testing…
Wow. Just wow.
Guess you will just need to use equines to do parasite control, if my memory serves me right about a previous post you… posted…. (As I shake my head at the things people do to themselves and each other…)
My vet switched me over to panacur this year; everyone is healthy so far! Ivomec ran it’s course in New York -
I didn’t realize that this was why it was so hard to get these days….I’ve been on a waiting list for a while. Crazy! Any chance you’d email me the source that has some? I’d love to get my hands on some.
On the “just kidding” side – I suppose you could sell your stash if you needed a sudden, large influx of cash.
this is going to sound totally cuckoo. But there are plants whose parts, if harvested & prepared properly, can kill parasites without harming the host animal.
one of these is the outer green shell of the black walnut seed. Last fall, while gathering apples at a U-pick orchard belonging to a monastery, we found a black walnut tree at exactly the right stage. It was dropping its walnuts, some were still fresh upon the ground, the outer shells were fresh, perfect & green, and bref, we collected two.
on the way out we spoke to the monk at the gate. (these fruit orchards are a giant commercial operation, close to the biggest fruit juice processor in the whole world. The monks are expert modern orchardists working closely with the agricultural ministry of the province.)
the friendly brother told us that the black walnut tree was one of 3 given to the monastery about 10 years previously by agriculture quebec, in an experiment to see how they would naturalize this far north.
the trees themselves are famous for their valuable wood, which is used in fine furniture making. A little-known by-product is the antihelmintic property of the seed casing.
i made a vodka tincture of my one perfect seed husk. I’m not a novice at this; i have a lot of experience. My tincture promptly turned inky black, exactly like the black walnut tinctures that can be bought in health food stores. I left it on the plant material over the winter. Others strain off their tinctures prematurely, but i belong to the school that says leave on plant material at least 6 months.
there’s no way of knowing whether my tincture works for worms. I mean, i don’t have worms, i don’t know anybody who has worms. This tincture is also good for its anti-bacterial action, which is why i made it. It can be droppered onto sea salt & used to brush gums & teeth to help prevent gum infections …
turning back to the lambs & other large 4-legged mammals, i am wondering about a black walnut tincture. You could make it yourself, if somebody would give you the black walnuts (timing of this would be tricky, as they have to be fresh-harvested & processed right away. It’s the exterior green shell of the seed that’s valuable, and this won’t last long after picking.)
you’d have to put up several quarts, perhaps gallons. Very roughly, would need something like 18-22 fresh green black walnut husks, finely chopped, per gallon of the macerating alcohol medium.
this year’s crop, to be harvested in october in the northeast but much earlier near virginia, would not be usable until the spring/summer of 2012. All of the alcohol from the vodka or grain alcohol could eventually be removed by heating the final tincture (but not before maturity.) Alcohol is driven off at temperatures much lower than boiling. Theoretically speaking, the heating-to-remove-alcohol step should not affect the antithelmintic properties of the solution, which would then become medicine for the lambs.
if perchance this would work, or help significantly, black walnuts would be a dirt cheap, forever renewable source of anti-worming medication.
there are other plants that should be added to boost the antihelmintic properties.
like i said, very cuckoo idea.
This may give a whole new meaning to a wolf in sheeps clothing
There has to be some median between holistic veterinary and chemical veterinary applications. I know there can be a lot of science in holistic but, lik eyou said, this particular wormer is the end of th eline, drug wise. Hopefully networking, as you do well, will bring to light a new to you solution that doesnt baaa-ck you into a chemical corner(couldnt resist). Good Luck and my middle child just has to add her favorite medical word, necrotizing fasciitis(sp?)
Is the drug available overseas? Do you know anyone living abroad who might be able to bring back a supply for you?
There is still some hope if you want to/need to use chemical dewormers. The “end of the line” is usually considered to be Cydectin (moxidectin), which is in (roughly) the same class as the ivermectins. This drug is the most recent one approved in the US and is in ready supply. There are some others not often seen by the sheep parasites (like pyrantel pamoate for horses and human pinworms) which can also help sometimes. There have also been some interesting findings with people who are using two classes of dewormers at the same time (not mixed, but sequential) and finding significantly higher rates of reduction in the parasite population than from either dewormer alone. All before we get one of the newer ones from Australia (I hope we get them). I think the more likely true story on the recent levamisole shortage was what was told to me by AgriLabs a while back: that the drug had proven useful in human cancer trials and their only supplier was selling to the pharma drug trials for more money. They had another source identified but needed to go through the approvals. IMO, I would say the non-chemical approaches may be more in the preventive rather than the treatment category and would not be helpful if you really needed a dewormer to treat parasites.
Here’s my question: How do they figure out to put something like dewormer into cocaine? Do they see it sitting around one day and say to themselves “Why don’t we give this poison a try?” Do drug lords have livestock so they had some Levamisole on hand and it fell into a batch of coke that was being cut and they figured “Oh, what the hell?”
I was just wondering.
Unfortunately, we used Cydectin during the period when levamisole was nearly impossible to find and developed resistance within one year. Hence the recent switch to Levamisole. According to Anne Zajack, the parasitologist at Virginia Tech who literally wrote the book on parasites and brought FAMACHA to the U.S., if you’ve got resistance to the Ivermectins, you’re going to develop resistance to Cydectin quickly, because of the crossover.
I think your source on the shortage was mistaken; Levamisole was used to treat cancer in the 1990s and was withdrawn from the U.S market in 2000 due to the risk of serious side-effects and the fact that there were safer and more effective replacements.
And I agree with you on the non-chemical wormers. We’ve tried most of those approaches and, as much as we wish they worked, they just don’t. Recent studies have just come out debunking garlic, for one. I could see how they might be effective if you live in a climate with a very short growing season that gets very hard freezes every year, but here in the South, it’s just not going to work.
On Anne Zajack’s recommendation, we are going to try supplementing with copper boluses in the individuals that are showing the most resistance, if any, to Levamisole. She thinks it will give us at least a couple of years with Levamisole, which is hopefully, all we need. [Here's an article about using copper boluses, for anyone who's interested: https://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/copper_wire.html ]
Yes, Cydectin acts in the same way as the ivermectins, so I can see why you have to use the levamisole. I use Anne’s book (old edition) all the time! A number of people are reporting very good success with the COWP boluses. I have not tried them yet but I have all the capsules and particles. And you might check into research from Langston University Goat Research Ext (Dr Steve Hart) on the double dosing effects; some combinations in certain situations were 95% effective when individually there was considerable resistance.
Interesting information on the shortage situation; I got my info from the manufacturer here in St Joe, MO and hey seemed pretty convincing. They must have made some changes when they got back up and running since the new version of the Prohibit dewormer is clear and not that neon yellow color. But they are the same people who make much of the now-strangely-back-ordered Vitamin B Complex – so who knows what is really going on there. I am pretty sure if it really was the drug lords, the Feds would yank levamisole pretty quickly — but make it available via prescription. We also have tried the non chemical route — and we even have plenty of hard freezes here in Missouri. But the heat and moisture is just too inviting. I wish they would make some headway on that vaccination solution that seems to have been going nowhere for years.
You have to infiltrate the drug rings (there’s lots of them in southern AZ, very near the border…), send in some spies. I could see this becoming a best-selling novel. Or at least a made for TV movie?
Holey-moley, that’s scary! Yet another reason to legalize drugs, REGULATE them and tax the heck out of them.
Here’s hoping the battle against the parasites stays in your favor.
Unbelievable! Like someone else said, how on earth do they come up with these other drugs to cut their drugs. Makes me just shake my head and say wonder what this world is coming to.
I sure hope you get what you need, Susan, for all of the flock there.
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