PCP, BY ANY NAME, IS TROUBLE

Who knows how, when or where the craze got started?

All Dr. Richard Pinder can say for sure about "illy" or "wet" - marijuana,
tobacco or mint leaves soaked in embalming fluid - is that this "new" high
has become the rage in Connecticut's drug scene over the past year.

And that it's a scam.

"If you smoke a cigarette that's been dipped in embalming fluid, all you're
doing is smoking a cigarette with a little extra garbage in it," said
Pinder, director of toxicology at the state Department of Public Safety.
"It's not going to get you high."

Illy does get you stoned - very stoned - not because of its alleged
formaldehyde content, but because it's almost always laced with
phencyclidine or PCP, which teens of my generation knew as angel dust.

But while we figured out fairly quickly that the power-packed high's
equally potent nasty side wasn't worth it, today's kids consider illy
relatively benign - like souped-up pot.

"It's kind of like pot multiplied maybe 30 times - but it makes you sick,"
said Jose Mercado, 19, of Hartford. "I smoked it early in the day and got
high as hell. I still felt bad at one o'clock in the morning. I'll never
touch it again."

The seemingly endless stream of kids I saw copping on Garden Street while
working on another story were mostly 14, 15 years old. Mercado was the one
who explained to me what was changing hands.

"Wet. You know, embalming fluid," he replied. Getting off on formaldehyde
has a certain Gothic appeal to teens, who gain a sense of bravado from it.
"It'll make you want to kill yourself, but it's become the thing to do," he
said.

He thought formaldehyde was the active ingredient, as did I until I talked
to Pinder, who analyzes illicit drugs seized on the streets by police.

Pinder suspects formaldehyde may not even be a component in some cases.

The "wet" that police have been turning over to him increasingly during the
past year has taken the form of a liquid, usually clear, or a granular
blackish powder that tests positive for PCP.

"The formaldehyde has to evaporate before you smoke it, so how does a kid
know it's in there? Because the dealer tells him it is," Pinder said.

"It's just marketing. You walk into Stop & Shop, you can buy a can of soup
under the Stop & Shop label. Well, Nordstrom's could take that same can of
soup, slap Gucci on it, and everybody would want some."

Pinder says he was warned of this trend five years ago, when he went to the
prison on Weston Street in Hartford to talk to inmates about cocaine and
heroin, and they told him " wet was a lot more significant."

Ever since, he has seen an increase in submissions of PCP. Marketing it as
embalming fluid plays a big role in its comeback - big enough that funeral
homes in New York and other states across the country have been burglarized
by thieves demanding formaldehyde.

Big enough that dealers unable to obtain it substitute turpentine or other
noxious substances for show.

Turpentine, acetone, formaldehyde - whatever the agent that is carrying the
PCP has to evaporate, leaving almost nothing behind.

And formaldehyde wouldn't even give you a little buzz, wet or dry, says Dr.
Thomas Gilchrist, associate medical examiner for the state.

The purest formaldehyde you can get is 37 percent, which labs now purchase
diluted 10 times. Even in the days before it came prepackaged at that
strength, when medical examiners mixed it themselves, "I never even felt
remotely high from it," he said.

One of life's little ironies is that because its smell is similar to PCP,
formaldehyde was one of its street names during the 70s.

But PCP doesn't even come close to its acrid, irritating stench.

"Your eyes water, they burn, your nose burns, your mouth burns - it makes
you think your head came off, and God help you if you spill any on your
skin," Gilchrist said.

If you drank it, it would kill you. If you injected it, "it would hurt a
hell of a lot." But if you smoke plain formaldehyde and it does something
to you "it's all in your head," he said.

As is the PCP - literally.

Illy or wet doesn't make you crazy, per se, though you may behave that way;
nor does it convey superhuman strength, though you may perform feats of
strength and take chances you otherwise wouldn't.

It's an anesthetic, Pinder explains. You feel no pain whatsoever - so you
may well keep advancing, even though you are mortally wounded, out-manned
and out-armed.

And because you hallucinate intensely, you may come out of it "in an
altered state of reality and be really frightened, defensive and combative."

Though it has been cited as a cause of death twice in this state, it isn't
particularly lethal, but it could get you killed, according to Gilchrist.

"The person I'm doing an autopsy on may have died because he got shot - but
before he got shot, he may have been smoking illy."

Police say Sonny Flowers was on it in June when he stabbed his 2-year- old
daughter in the skull repeatedly with an 8-inch carving knife, also
wounding her mother and Douglas Lariviere, the first police officer at the
scene, stabbing him in the head and neck.

Another regular smoker was Anthony Ewing, a.k.a. "Craze," formerly
Hartford's most wanted fugitive until he was nabbed in Canada in December,
2001, and charged with killing one man and shooting three other people.

And to think PCP is finding a place at raves beside so-called hug- drugs
such as Ecstasy and date-rape drug GHB - and that "love" and "lovely" are
among its street names.

So if the finer points of PCP elude us, so what? What we really need to
know is that it's back - big time. What we really need to do is warn our
kids away from it.