Hi Ya'll! We have the option on Skool here to host an online community meet up! We could meet each other and share maybe an hour with our colleagues chit chatting about whatever we need to chit chat about. Would this interest anyone? If so, what would be your ideal days and times? Looking forward to your feedback!

If you know colleagues who could benefit from free professional training and resources, feel free to invite them to join our community. Everything inside the ST³ community is free to join, and members can also participate in our free courses and discussions with professionals from across the field. The more people who join, the stronger the learning network becomes for everyone. You can share this link directly with anyone who might benefit: https://www.skool.com/st3/about We appreciate you helping grow a space where professionals can learn, connect, and support one another. See you around the Skool soon! Dr. C

There’s a drug showing up in fentanyl supply that most people haven’t heard of yet. It’s called medetomidine -street name “rhino tranq”. It’s a veterinary tranquilizer, 100 to 200 times more potent than xylazine which had previously caused havoc. It’s been linked to four overdose deaths in California so far. It doesn’t respond to naloxone. Let me say that again. Narcan doesn’t reverse it. In Philadelphia, it went from appearing in 29% of the drug supply in May 2024 to 87% by November. Xylazine dropped from 97% to 42% in the same period one dangerous adulterant was replaced by another almost overnight. The pattern is now reaching across North America. Here’s what concerns me as an Addiction Expert: Most treatment programs are still building their protocols around fentanyl and xylazine. The drug supply is already moved past that. Patients are showing up with substances in their systems that standard drug tests can’t even detect. Withdrawal from medetomidine can require ICU level care, and the clinical teams treating these patients may not know what they’re dealing with until it’s too late. Meanwhile, national overdose deaths are declining for the first time in years, down almost 19% according to the latest CDC data. That’s genuinely good news, but it’s masking what’s happening underneath: the drugs on the street are getting more complex and more unpredictable and harder to treat. And this isn’t even considering the novel potent opioids,such as those in the nitazine family. The crisis isn’t ending -it’s evolving. The treatment programs that will save the most lives in 2026 are the ones updating their protocols as fast as the drug supply is changing. Reminder: This does NOT respond to Naloxone.