From: glen mccready 
  To: Dead Beef <0xdeadbeef@substance.abuse.blackdown.org>
Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 16:38:34 -0400

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 16:05:02 -0400
From: Keith Bostic <bostic@bsdi.com>
To: /dev/null@python.bostic.com
Subject: ... which had remained erect for three days

Forwarded-by: rob@plan9.att.com

 WASHINGTON (UPI)--Doctors warned Friday of a potentially dangerous new
method of cocaine abuse--injecting the drug directly into the urinary
tract--a practice that led to complications costing one man his penis,
nine of his fingers and parts of his legs.

In a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association, physicians
from New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center report the case of a
34-year-old man who suffered severe bleeding under the skin after he pumped
cocaine into the urethra of his penis.

Despite intensive medical treatment, doctors were forced to amputate the
man's legs above the knee and all but one of his fingers. The patient's
penis fell off by itself, doctors said.

`They (cocaine users) fill an eye dropper or a syringe with the needle
taken off with a coke solution and inject the solution into the penis,''
said Dr. Samuel Perry, one of the letter's co-authors.

Perry said the man was admitted to a New York hospital for a problem with
his penis, which had remained erect for three days resulting in a painful
inability to urinate. The man told doctorsthat in the weeks before his
hospitalization, he had occasionally injected cocaine into his penis before
intercourse in an effort to enhance sexual performance.

On his third day in the hospital, the man's erection suddenly went down,
but blood leaked into the tissues and coagulated under the skin of his
feet, hands, genitals, back and chest over the next 12 hours.

The blood coagulation caused the skin, muscle and other tissue to die over
large areas of the patient's body, and he was transferred to the burn unit
of New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center.

There dead skin and tissue was removed and amputations were performed to
stop the spread of gangrene. The man is currently recovering in a
rehabilitation facility.

Perry said the severe problem with blood coagulation may have been caused
by the prolonged erection, which is called priapism. `But more likely it
was caused by cocaine or impurities in the cocaine,' he said.

In the past, drug abuse treatment experts have reported men putting
cocaine powder on the surface of the penis in an effort to halt premature
ejacuation or otherwise improve sexual sensations. Women also sometimes try
to enhance sexual pleasure by rubbing cocaine powder on their genital
organs.

Perry, who is a professor of clinical psychiatry, said men who inject
cocaine into the penis ``report that it gives them a real sexual high,' but
he said it is not known if the sensation is more intense than that produced
by snorting cocaine or injecting the narcotic elsewhere in the body.

`We report this case to alert clinicians to this new method of cocaine
abuse and to describe its rare and previously unreported complications,'
the doctors wrote.