Who is she? That’s the question on everyone’s mind when it comes to the drug known as “pink cocaine,” which has gotten a bump largely thanks to its celebrity connections. It’s been mentioned multiple times in the trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs, with one producer saying in a 2024 complaint that the musician had ordered him to have it on hand at all times; an ex-girlfriend, Yung Miami, was arrested for carrying it in 2023. More recently, New England Patriots wide receiver Stefon Diggs was caught on video over Memorial Day weekend aboard a yacht flashing baggies of an unidentified pink powder and referring to himself as “Mr. Make It Happen on a Boat,” sparking rumors that it was the drug. (Diggs later told reporters that he had “had a conversation with [Patriots coach Mike] Vrabel, obviously, and I’ll echo everything he said hoping everybody is making good decisions…Everything else is everything else. The particulars are all internal.”) Cardi B was photographed on said boat too. Pink cocaine was also found (with other drugs) in Liam Payne’s bloodstream in a toxicology report following his 2024 death after falling from a hotel balcony in Argentina.
If nobody seems to really know what pink cocaine is, beyond its memorable name and hue, that’s because, well, nobody really knows. Consider the up-and-coming party drug the Anna Delvey of nose candy: Its backstory is rich, hazy, and nigh impossible to fact-check with total confidence.
Pink cocaine, sometimes called “tusi,” “tuci,” or “tusibi,” is indeed pink, but the pharmacological makeup is not always certain: it usually includes ketamine, and rarely actually contains cocaine. The formula varies from batch to batch, so results of using it can vary widely, and could even be fatal.
“It’s not a drug, it’s a drug concoction,” says Joseph Palamar, an associate professor of population health at NYU Langone. “Pink cocaine can contain cocaine, but it’s almost always a mixture of ketamine and other drugs.” Palamar, who has spent his career researching party drugs, told Vanity Fair that pink cocaine has been on the rise since late 2019 or so, likely thanks to ease of production, variability of formulas, and name recognition.
In addition to the ketamine, “pink cocaine” may also include MDMA, caffeine, fentanyl, meth, or other substances—dealer’s choice.
“You could call anything Tusi, the same way you could call anything cocaine,” Palamar says. Think “a rose by any other name,” but inside out and about drugs. He also pointed out that while the mixture likely has its origins in Latin America, based on analyzed samples, pink cocaine isn’t something that really has to be imported, because “any shithead could make it.” (Definitionally, cocaine is made from the leaves of the coca plant and making it is a complex, multi-step process.)
“I don’t recommend that anyone make it, but that’s that. There have been very big seizures, like off the shore of somewhere in California over a year ago. But typically it can be made here. Ketamine should be the main drug in it, so if you have access to ketamine, then you could probably make it. You [just] need the dye.”
The dye may be food coloring, or other additives. Alex Krotulski, another researcher and forensic toxicologist, told Vanity Fair that he’s even heard rumors of people using Kool-Aid to give their mixtures that distinctive rosy hue. (Thank reddit for this one: What do you call it when you snort Kool-Aid? A punchline.)
Krotulski, who is the director of toxicology and chemistry at the Center for Forensic Science Research Education, spends his time analyzing samples of all kinds—“pills, powders, plant materials, biological samples, blood, urine, saliva, anything you can imagine”—to decode their drug contents.
“Our goal is to know what drugs are out there, what drug combinations there are, what people are using, what’s new and emerging, what’s going away,” he says. Through tracking the samples, the center’s work can help identify trending drugs and what to look out for in the landscape.
“The term ‘pink cocaine’ is really the street name of the drug,” Krotulski says. “I would equate it to how people talk about opioids: People talk about dope, but dope could be heroin, it could be fentanyl, it could be other opioids. It could be no opioids at all. Who knows? They could buy something that actually doesn’t contain opioids. And that’s kind of the same theory with pink cocaine. It’s something that’s easy for people to understand and physically see. It’s kind of a sexy term, I think, much more than other names that drugs get at times.”
Why pink? Why not pink?
To add to the intrigue and confusion, pink cocaine’s alter ego, Tusi, implies relation to another, very different drug.
In 1974, hallucinogen pioneer Alexander Shulgin was the first to synthesize a compound known as 2C-B, often called simply “2C” for its family tree of related compounds. He developed it for use in psychotherapy, but recreational use of the drug (sometimes called Nexus) became a popular rave drug in the ‘90s, often as a substitute for Ecstasy. Eventually, it became harder to obtain. Now try saying “2C” out loud: “Tusi.”
As Palamar noted in a 2023 research paper, this sly homophone was likely intentional and something of a marketing gimmick, piggybacking on a familiar name to convince buyers to try the new drug. “It looks like that’s how it started,” he told VF. “People likely did not know what the hell they were using, like, whether it was a 2C-B or was it this new-to-you Tusi drug.”
Even the experts get tripped up, Palamar wrote in the paper: “The Tusi phenomenon complicates the drug landscape because it has the potential to confuse both people who use and researchers alike.”
And, it should be noted, Tusi, pink cocaine, whatever name you want to call it, has a very different effect than the 2C of yore, or the cocaine it’s named for. Instead of being a hallucinogen like 2C, or a stimulant like cocaine, the mostly ketamine pink cocaine is instead an anesthetic with dissociative effects. Depending on what it’s mixed with in the compound itself, the size of the bump the user takes (it’s typically snorted), whether they’ve been drinking, if they’ve eaten or slept or are in a weird mood to begin with or any number of other factors, the experience of pink cocaine can vary greatly.
“If you do a bigger bump, it may take a few minutes, but you might start to leave the planet a little bit,” Palamar said. “You probably won’t like it if it was not expected.” Ketamine and alcohol in combination can make a user violently ill, too, he said. “I feel bad for the people that think they’re getting cocaine in a bar and they get pink cocaine. They’re going to be in a horrible situation.”
To complicate things a little more, actual 2C does still exist on the party market, though not as prevalently as it once did.
“A lot of the younger generation probably have no idea about that history and about even the 2C drug,” Palamar says. “You get someone who’s 19 and starts going out clubbing today, they probably don’t know about 2C-B and all that, right? They’ve heard Tusi or pink cocaine, that’s the new drug.”
Krotulski, too, pointed out the ephemeral nature of drug cocktails and trends, and the unknowability of what that powder actually is in the moment, due to the nature of recreational drugs.
“If you look at a powder, it doesn’t matter if it’s white, pink, blue, purple, you really never know what’s in it,” he said. “White powder could be sugar, could be table salt, or it could be fentanyl, or it could be cocaine, or it could be whatever, right? That’s kind of the area that this falls into. While the majority of testing and analysis has shown that usually it’s ketamine and MDMA, it’s not always the case, because either one of those could be substituted out for something else, or you could actually have other drugs present.”
But then, what if something is cocaine, but it’s also pink? What would Krotulski call that, if not pink cocaine?
“Say somebody mixes Kool-Aid with cocaine, and we test that in a lab,” he explains patiently. “It’s pink. It’s cocaine. We probably wouldn’t call that pink cocaine anymore. That’s just a cocaine sample that was pink.”
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