PCP is one of the most maligned and misunderstood drugs there is. But its notorious reputation didn’t come out of nowhere.
In 2010, mixed-martial artist Jarrod Wyatt, 26, was arrested for the murder of his training partner, Taylor Powell.
When police arrived at a home in Northern California, they found Wyatt naked and covered in blood. The officers found Powell dead on the couch with his chest cut open and his heart, tongue and the skin of his face removed. An autopsy revealed that the organs had been removed while Powell was still alive.
Wyatt was reportedly convinced that the world was about to end and that Powell was the devil. According to witnesses, the two had ingested hallucinogenic mushrooms before Wyatt attacked and killed Powell.
One could be excused for assuming that they’d taken a taken a different psychedelic drug, especially LSD or PCP, better known as angel dust.
PCP has arguably the worst reputation of any drug in history.
In a 1980 article called “The Dusting of America: The Image of PCP in the Popular Media,” researchers studied hundreds of newspaper articles about PCP, most of them from the late 1970s. They constructed a table illustrating the frequency of popular PCP horror stories. In descending order, the most common accounts were: PCP user gouges out his own eyes (17 separate news items); PCP user shot to death by cops after running naked through streets; PCP user drowns in shower under only four inches of water; PCP user shoots and kills own father, mother and grandfather; immobilized by PCP, user burns to death in flames before realizing they’re in danger; user removes one or several of their own body parts; man crosses freeway, enters a house, randomly stabs pregnant woman and toddler; and several other accounts of PCP-induced horror.
One should of course beware of how drugs are portrayed in the popular press, given their tendency to twist facts to fit an agenda. Thankfully, the discussion on psychedelics has come a long way since the acid scares of the 1970s. Recent clinical trials, for example, have monitored the effects of microdosing with LSD at home as a treatment for major depressive disorder. The legal landscape of these substances is changing globally amidst continuous emerging research on the various benefits of their therapeutic use. In recent years, psychedelic advocates have successfully pushed for wider mainstream acceptance of specific substances, while quietly dissociating themselves from others. PCP is one such drug that falls firmly into the latter category.
As Troy Farah pointed out in Why Does The Psychedelic Scene Ignore PCP? (Psychedelics Today), “even attitudes on heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine have slightly relaxed—sure, these drugs can be highly addictive, but few believe they turn you into a bloodthirsty monster.”
His view is shared by Dr. Carl Hart, a neuroscientist and professor of psychology at Columbia University. “I am deeply disturbed that there is a deafening silence from the psychedelic community while fellow drug users continue to be brutalized as a result of PCP related misapprehensions,” Hart wrote in his most recent book, Drug Use For Grownups. But he acknowledges a likely explanation: “Drawing attention to the fact that PCP is also a psychedelic might jeopardize the reputation, and thus the availability, of other psychedelics.”
Two vials of liquid PCP. Photo Credit: Sam Iravani
Indeed, PCP’s reputation is truly, notoriously bad. Given the continuing litany of horror stories after over 50 years of street use, it would appear that this drug is in a different league from LSD and other drugs with which it’s often compared. But is it really? Or is the stigma around PCP almost exclusively of the media’s creation?
Well, yes and no.
PCP was originally developed as a surgical anesthetic by Parke, Davis and Co. in the late 50s, but it proved unacceptable for human use because it produced severe post-operative side effects of agitation, delirium and disorientation. It did not take long for PCP to find its way onto the streets. In the 1960s, the drug’s trippy qualities and feeling of floaty euphoria caught on with the hippies in San Francisco seeking to explore the mind.
Doctors who treated young patients for the effects of PCP predicted it would have a short life as a street drug. The doctors could not have been more wrong. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, PCP emerged as a leading drug of use, gaining considerable notoriety in the media as a drug with particularly novel and devastating effects. Cigarettes dipped in liquid PCP, known as “dippers,” became the norm, replacing the powder form that achieved most of its popularity during the early 1970s.
Yet, despite its bad reputation, and becoming a much more niche drug at a national level since the 1980s, PCP remains alive and well in some parts of the US, including in Houston, Kansas City, Stamford, DC, and Philadelphia.
PCP is a very potent drug. There’s a saying on the street, “Two puffs I’m good, three puffs I’m whacked,” which is when people do crazy stuff like pull out their own teeth. In other words, just one hit too many can make the difference between having a good time and having a very bad time indeed. Given that street concentrations of PCP vary dramatically, a dosage that is both effective and safe is difficult to establish. On these grounds, PCP is more dangerous than many other drugs.
However, the liquid form of PCP is much harder to dose than the powder form. The reason is mainly the cutting agent for liquid PCP, which is diethyl ether. One gallon from the lab is cut to 5 gallons before it is sold, says Frank Lyga, a former LAPD narcotics detective. The end buyer will also cut it for more profit. PCP dosed cigarettes or “dippers” are notoriously unpredictable because solutions are made at different concentrations. It’s hard to get each cigarette to absorb the same amount of solution, and if the bottle is left open, the solvent will evaporate causing the concentration to increase. This method often produced PCP overdoses, as well as those notorious PCP horror stories.
But in places like San Francisco’s Mission District, a predominantly Latino working-class neighborhood, it’s a different story.
According to Adam S., a former PCP user who lived in the Mission District during the 1980s and 1990s, PCP was an extremely popular drug in the neighborhood during this time, and especially with Latino gang members, whom he was closely affiliated with.
“The Mission District used to be so hood in the 80s and 90s,” he says. “You could buy a joint of powdered PCP rolled with parsley at almost any corner of those blocks. Crazy times. Glad I had the experience.”
He continues: “I don’t know why we got it in powder because most people I knew that smoked it on the east coast or even Los Angeles, it would be sherm sticks [cigarettes dipped in a liquid form of PCP].”
I explain to Adam that powdered PCP is much easier to dose than the liquid form, thus less likely to produce those PCP horror stories. Did any PCP horror stories occur in the Mission District in the 1980s?
“No, there was none of that and most of that I will say was urban legend,” he says. “Just two potential suicides. One hung himself in the basement, one jumped off a building. That’s all.”
Indeed, the lack of bad behavior shown by those who use the powder form of PCP compared to the liquid form appears striking. I tell Adam that in places such as Stamford, Connecticut, and Lufkin, Texas, where dippers are in common use today, police see the stripping naked and the destructive, violent behavior on a weekly basis. However, the stripping naked is something he never saw in the Mission District. True, some people could get violent on PCP, he says, but these were already violent people. He recalls that PCP users were, in his experience, likely to exhibit drunk-like behavior in which they had limited mobility, but they were rarely dangerous.
PCP user holding dipper. Photo Credit: Sam Iravani
PCP is a highly individualistic drug and users may experience vastly different reactions. However, users commonly report that the drug acts as a mood enhancer.
As one user told the Los Angeles Times in 1977:
“Whatever feeling you’ve got, PCP will bring it up even higher. Like if you’ve got a hostile feeling, then you get in an argument and it all comes out.”
During the late 70s and early 80s, police were involved regularly in violent encounters with people high on PCP, especially in certain urban areas where use of the drug was most prevalent. In particular, the city of Compton, California experienced PCP use in epidemic proportions during this time. In his book Vice: One Cop’s Story of Patrolling America’s Most Dangerous City, former Compton cop John Baker recalls the dawn of the angel dust epidemic:
“Angel dust introduced new dangers not only to the users but to the police as well. Criminals we had known for years and who would normally have surrendered after a chase or a fistfight became homicidal psychopaths, immune to beatings or even to chemical sprays.”
As Baker noted, PCP use was especially prevalent among gang members and violent criminals who were drawn to the increased sense of power and invincibility that the drug conferred. In other words, PCP had become popular with exactly the type of people who should never use it. Without question, the drug caused some real problems in urban areas that were already plagued by violent crime. It turned bad guys “badder,” and this, in combination with testimony from medical professionals, helped establish PCP’s reputation for causing unpredictable, irrational, and violent behavior. The “superhuman strength” that has been observed among PCP users, while perhaps a hyperbolic term, was not entirely untrue. Many police departments were finding that PCP-related injuries to officers were stretching their thin blue line to the limit. It could take six or more officers to physically restrain one PCP-intoxicated individual, according to police reports.
The scrawny white kid with dreadlocks who loves smoking PCP on the weekend may view such reports as a myth, i.e., something that doesn’t exist. But that is based solely on his own reaction to PCP, and possibly that of his friends, which overlooks the individualistic responses determined by our individual biochemistry and personality.
PCP in several forms seized by the DEA
Yet, while aggressive behavior is accentuated in some people when PCP is ingested, it is not reasonable to conclude that violence is a direct result of PCP use. Contrary to popular belief, the linkage of PCP use and violence is not supported by empirical evidence. The literature on PCP producing violence is at best inconsistent. Furthermore, PCP horror stories are usually the result of mental illness, polydrug abuse, extreme overdoses, or are just a lot more complicated than they initially seem.
One of the most fascinating (and also notorious) PCP horror stories is that of rapper Antron Singleton, better known by his stage name Big Lurch. He is serving a life sentence for murdering 21-year-old associate Tynisha Ysais and eating parts of her body in April 2002.
My correspondence with Lurch began in 2013 when I wrote to him in prison, looking to hear about his experiences with PCP. Initially he was reluctant to open up about it, wary of me and my motives, until I told him I was interested in it from a research viewpoint as opposed to that of a drug user. We became pen pals for a time and via his long, handwritten letters, he told me everything about his journey with PCP addiction.
Lurch had been admitted into mental institutions on several occasions due to his PCP use. On one occasion, he needed a blood transfusion after developing rhabdomyolysis, a rare side effect of PCP use. Rhabdomyolysis is a condition that causes your muscles to break down, leading to muscle death. When this happens, toxic components of your muscle fibers enter your circulation system and kidneys.
Essentially, Lurch’s body rejected the PCP and he could have died.
It was clear to me that Lurch’s addiction to PCP was never going to end well. In particular, one thing he told me stood out:
“I’m bipolar so PCP would cause me extreme manic episodes along with psychosis; or depressed states mixed with psychosis/delusions. Being bipolar is tricky, because in my most manic states, I can go a week without sleep and sleep deprivation causes psychosis…when mixed with PCP…horrible combination.”
Lurch’s lawyer, Milton Grimes, conceded that Lurch had committed the crime in a psychotic state brought on by a five-day PCP binge. During this five-day binge, Lurch had had little to no sleep. In addition to his bipolar medication (Depakote), Lurch was on an antipsychotic drug (Haldol) and an anticholinergic drug (Cogentin) the night before the tragedy. Sleep deprivation alone can cause dangerous psychosis, let alone throwing PCP and three prescription meds into the mix on top of an already bipolar mindset. No one really knows how all these drugs interact.
Furthermore, most, if not all PCP is produced by amateur chemists in Southern California, according to police sources, which means that the street supply of PCP may be potentially toxic. For example, PCC is very toxic and appears in poorly synthesized batches as a byproduct of the manufacturing process. When drugs are contaminated, or cut with unlisted, dangerous chemicals, they can trigger an acute psychotic episode. Lurch told me something similar in his own words:
“Street witch doctors/chemists all use different levels of the main ingredients, as well as other additives such as ‘brake fluid,’ in order to stretch their product and maximize profits. As a result, every time a user buys PCP, he’s liable to experience a different high due to the fact that no 2 batches of PCP being created the same. Not only does the level of potency vary from dealer to dealer, but also the high, psychedelic euphoria, anesthetic properties and psychosis differs from batch to batch. Due to the many side and effects and ingredients within PCP, users never know what type of trip they’ll encounter with each use.”
But, although Lurch may have ingested a bad batch on the day of Ysais’ murder, it’s not the full story. While he was clearly psychotic at the time of his arrest, it is not known whether he was psychotic at the time of the murder.
Los Angeles Police Detective Francis Hardiman, a drug recognition expert, testified that Lurch acted in an intentional and deliberate manner. Lurch’s blood contained 10 nanograms of PCP. Hardiman testified that the sheriff’s department did not consider suspects having less than 5 nanograms of PCP per millilitre as having PCP in their blood. Los Angeles Police Department records showed that between the years 1999 and 2003, the highest tested amount of PCP intoxication was 118 nanograms per millilitre of blood and the average was 47 nanograms per millilitre. Lurch’s level of intoxication, as reflected in nanograms per millilitre, was the lowest of tested suspects since 1999.
Whatever really happened that day, it would be ignorant or disingenuous to say PCP was the only factor involved. It may not even be the most important factor. Lurch had both psychological and biological risk factors that should have prevented him from using, let alone abusing PCP. And yet, whether he actually killed Ysais remains inconclusive. Her mother believes that he did not receive a fair trial, and many unanswered questions and conspiracy theories persist.
Similarly notorious is the case of Mark Sappington, a 26-year-old Kansas City man convicted of killing three friends, including a teenager whose body was dismembered and partially eaten in his mother’s basement. Sappington tried to suck the blood of two his victims, which earned him the sobriquet, “Kansas City Vampire.”
Sappington had claimed that voices ordered him to act when he killed three of his victims, during a four-day span in April 2001. In a taped confession, Sappington said that voices in his head told him he had to eat flesh and blood or he would die— voices he only heard when he was high on PCP.
Of course, there was more to the story. Sappington’s family had a history of mental illness, attorney Patricia Aylward Kalb told the jury. She said Sappington began suffering from schizophrenia when he was about 16 years old, and it got worse as he grew older.
“He was in a constant struggle from a very early age between good and evil,” Kalb said during closing arguments. “He thought this was something he was commanded to do.”
A PCP user who was found dead by Compton police in the 1980s with the classic overdose symptoms. Photo Credit: John Rick Baker
The medical community has long known that PCP is particularly dangerous for schizophrenics who are highly sensitive to the drug. While schizophrenics are not inherently violent, research indicates they are statistically at a higher risk of perpetrating violence than the general population due to paranoid delusions or command hallucinations, symptoms that are heavily exacerbated by PCP.
Even for those with borderline or sub-threshold forms of schizophrenia, PCP may be extremely dangerous.
It calls to mind the case of Michael Jackson, a PCP user convicted of killing a West Covina (Calif.) police officer in 1983, using a shotgun he’d pulled from a rack at the front of the patrol car.
Jackson claimed he had no memory of the events involving the shooting of the police officer. He acknowledged that he was a chronic user of PCP, having used it since 1977. He showed no signs of major mental illness. Yet, the appeals court judge faulted Los Angeles public defender William Klump for not presenting evidence that Jackson had once been diagnosed as schizophrenic.
While the aforementioned horror stories are certainly shocking, the fact remains that such stories are relatively rare. Alcohol is involved in a significant percentage of homicides annually, many of which are never reported simply because they’re routine or “boring.” On the other hand, reckless use of PCP often results in extreme, sometimes horrific consequences, thus it makes for perfect media fodder. Every few years, a new PCP horror story seems to pop up, further perpetuating the myth that the drug can turn a normal person into a murderous, raving psychopath.
However, PCP is not the only drug that has spawned a countless number of horror stories. LSD, for example, is a very powerful drug which has almost as much of a controversial history as PCP. There are many scare stories about LSD; such stories are difficult to confirm. Between 2018-2020, there have been at least 11 reported incidents of somebody killing another person while high on LSD, according to an investigation by VICE. “Many of the accounts echo one another,” VICE reports, “not only in the brutal details of the homicides but also in the various shades of dumbfounded shock felt by those who knew the killers. Anecdotally, most of the offenders seemed like ordinary, level headed people before taking the drug.” This is in stark contrast to most of the PCP-related homicides where the defendants typically had underlying mental disorders and/or severe behavioral problems.
There is not enough evidence to suggest that LSD is more dangerous than PCP. However, given that LSD is now being embraced by mainstream society, while PCP is sidelined and derided, smacks of hypocrisy and falsehood rather than scientific truth.
Even when PCP played a minimal or non-existent role in such stories, the media is often quick to blame the drug for the ensuing carnage.
According to online media outlets BrooklynVegan and the Daily Mail, L.A. rapper Andre Johnson, aka Christ Bearer, said PCP made him cut off his penis and jump out a window. However, in a 2015 interview with billboard.com, Johnson explained that the “why” was fairly straightforward: “PCP and meth and molly and alcohol and no sleep. That was the main thing: no sleep.”
In 2019, police in Edmond, Oklahoma, arrested a teenager after he allegedly threw a baby out of a shopping cart at Crest Foods, exposed himself and bent a traffic sign.
“The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics said they’re seeing PCP on high demand in Oklahoma and it’s becoming more common to see it mixed with marijuana,” KOKH reported.
Mark Woodward, a spokesperson for OBN, told reporters that PCP “is an evil drug.”
However, when I spoke to Mark Woodward for an article I was researching for VICE, he revealed that the contents of the 2019 article were misleading at best.
“At that time, we were seeing new cases that were suspected of being PCP, including two cases involving teens,” Woodward told me. “The suspects were acting so strange that it was suspected they were high on marijuana that was dipped in PCP. However, the toxicology tests came back positive only for THC. Due to the stronger potency marijuana oils being vaped today, especially among teens, some of the marijuana psychosis cases look exactly like a PCP high.”
In 2021, a 20-year-old Cleveland man was convicted of fatally stabbing his grandmother and wounding three children during a June 2019 attack.
Jalen Plummer attacked Diane Madison and the three children as they slept in their home off Chicasaw Avenue in Cleveland’s North Shore-Collinwood neighborhood, prosecutors said.
Plummer’s defense attorney, Henry Hilow, said that Plummer had no prior criminal history and no animus toward his grandmother. He was a good student who was preparing to attend Notre Dame College in South Euclid before the attack, Hilow said. “This is one of those circumstances that really had no explanation,” he said.
Hilow told the court that Plummer had smoked marijuana before the stabbing and believes he may have gotten some laced with PCP.
Prosecutors said there was no evidence to indicate Plummer had PCP in his system during the attack.
In a 2022 interview with scientific researcher and journalist Hamilton Morris, Charles Innes, the man who allegedly gouged out his eyes while high on PCP (in what may be the most famous of all PCP horror tales), told the true story of how he lost his vision. According to his personal testimony, Innes was entrapped, tricked into overdosing on PCP, brutalized by the Baltimore Police Department, and then mocked by journalists. It was a far cry from the sensationalist news media coverage that followed the tragic incident. It begs the question as to how many other PCP horror stories were demonstrably embroidered or otherwise unreliable.
PCP user and New York rapper Trevon Donovan aka Ru’de Rae Raw. Though Donovan does not advocate PCP use, he believes the drug has potential for microdosing and mental health advances. Photo Credit: Trevon Donovan
The constant stigma surrounding PCP is somewhat surprising given that it’s a chemical cousin of ketamine, the latest drug du jour among celebrities and high-profile figures. Ketamine’s surge in popularity comes from its unique ability to help individuals break free from negative thought patterns, foster a sense of connection and empathy, and promote a greater sense of self-awareness. And yet, PCP is still widely shunned as nothing more than an extremely dirty, highly dangerous street drug. Admittedly, while many people have not felt much therapeutic benefits or enlightenment off PCP, others have found it to be a rewarding experience.
Joe, a PCP user originally from Texas, told me about his experiences with the drug. Aged 18, he was charged with assaulting a police officer in his small West Texas town, though he firmly denies it. “They assaulted me,” he says. “It was just cops being cops wanting to cover their asses.” Fearing for his freedom, he went on the run and ended up in Northern California, feeling extremely depressed.
Joe, not his real name, eventually went to prison for five years for assault on a public servant. One day, prior to his arrest, he smoked 12 PCP joints to numb the emotional pain he felt. He recalls laying in bed, tripping hard, when he saw angels around him, taking care of him.
“It was a crazy one,” he says. “For the first week, pretty much all I did was lay there and trip hard. I cried a lot. I remember taking a shower one of the days and just balling because I didn’t understand why my life had happened like that. Then it went further and I sort of just let it all go and I felt I washed away my pain, fears, hurt, letdowns, etc go and I was renewed. It was a wonderful feeling. I forgave and felt forgiven. But I had a feeling of grandiose for sure and walked around preaching kindness and love for a while.”
Joe says PCP is the most spiritual drug he’s ever taken. “Timothy Wyllie wrote so many books on angels and used PCP as a medium to interact with them,” he says. “But I have heard others say the same thing and refer to it as angelic. It’s a common theme I look for now.”
It could be said that true psychedelics are not something that allow you to run away from your problems the way alcohol, opiates and the rest of normal drugs of abuse do. On the contrary, they have more of a tendency to make you take a very close hard look at yourself and everything else in your life. In this regard, PCP and its (comparatively rare) chemical analogues should be no different. Could it be that the stigma surrounding PCP is holding back a whole class of drugs with untapped therapeutic potential?
“I think there is immense untapped potential in PCP and PCP analogues for therapeutic use,” says Nervewing, the pseudonym used by the self-experimenter who has spent the better part of a decade exploring psychoactive drugs and their effects. “They create analytical and introspective spaces free of emotional biases and I think that can be really useful for people who are in a state of emotional crisis. The induced mania is also something that can be tempered and used to break out of extreme depressive states. I personally have seen the most value from a compound called 3-MeO-PCE specifically that has been extremely beneficial in helping me navigate emotionally challenging situations in the past. PCP is like more of a hedonistic rush than 3-MeO-PCP and 3-MeO-PCE, which feel deeper. But they’re very similar in their broader characteristics.”
“All of this stuff is medication if you use it the right away,” agrees Trevon Donovan, a PCP user and New York rapper known as Ru’de Rae Raw. “K2 became the new PCP but PCP is still going strong. People are like patients, they need it.”
Donovan says PCP has remained strong over the years because it offers a unique combination of dissociative, stimulant, and hallucinogenic effects. It can be a versatile drug, he says, depending on the dose and how you use it. “You mix it with weed it’s a different effect,” he says. “Weed is the earth and the PCP is the chemical, the space, the cosmic effect. So you got earth and space in one session.”
Donovan grew up in Spanish Harlem, the east coast supply hub for PCP, and started smoking the drug as a child. Despite having some bad trips over the years, he never did “no weirdo shit,” as he puts it, although he knows people that did. That was the reality of where he grew up. Although it only happens to a minority of users, he says, the crazy stuff that PCP users do—the self-destructive behavior, jumping out windows, and so forth—does happen.
Donovan agrees that PCP’s notorious reputation is unlikely to change much. Most drug dealers don’t care about their customers, and many drug users don’t care about responsible use. Even with the proper education, to expect users to test purity every time is a fantasy. It only matters that they all act the same way when they overuse (accidental or purposeful). And it always happens.
But, according to Donovan, PCP has serious potential for microdosing and mental health advances. He has seen low doses of the drug bring enough positive changes in himself and others that he implores researchers to take notice. And if they won’t do it, maybe he will, he says.
We are perhaps still in the dark age when it comes to understanding PCP and its array of complex effects. For example, the urge to strip naked may not be a result of PCP psychosis. During my research, I encountered PCP users who said they were fully conscious while disrobing in public; they felt compelled to do so for reasons that are not clearly understood. Of greatest concern, however, is the violent reaction that PCP produces in certain users. Although without question this has been exaggerated in the media and in the minds of the public, some individuals do develop these bizarre violent reactions. Such violent reactions appear to be an extension of PCP psychosis, but a good deal of additional research needs to be done in understanding what triggers these violent episodes.
What is clear is that it is long overdue for the public and the scientific community to reassess PCP. Not as a drug that can’t be extremely dangerous in certain users and if used without caution. But not as the boogeyman or pariah of the drugs world.
Sam Iravani is the author of Angel Dust Memories: True Tales of PCP in North America released by Feral House.
The information and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of this publication. The information, opinions and any included images are for educational purposes only. Included information is neither a substitute for, nor does it replace, professional legal advice or medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about laws, regulations or your health, you should always consult an attorney, physician or other licensed professional.
