Mystery 'pink cocaine' linked to Diddy sees bump across NYC's drug scene

Oct 28, 2024

The Big Apple’s newest drug bump isn’t so pretty in pink.

A pink “mystery powder” reportedly beloved by disgraced mogul Diddy and linked to a dangerous Venezuelan gang is blowing through New York City’s illicit drug scene, law enforcement sources and experts tell The Post.

The synthetic drug concoction known as “tusi” or “pink cocaine” has popped up in a growing number of recent narcotics busts, including of an Upper East Side woman who allegedly openly sold it on a messaging app, sources said.

“It is cheaper than coke,” said Ray Donovan, former chief of operations for the US Drug Enforcement Administration. “It is a cheap club drug.”

Tusi originally sprang up in Latin America within the last decade — as a phonetic play on “2C,” a group of psychedelic drugs popular in the nightlife set — said Joseph Palamar, an associate professor of population health at NYU Langone who recently published a study on the pink powder.

But the drug isn’t primarily 2C — or even cocaine, despite its monikers, he said.

Instead, it’s always mostly ketamine, in addition to swirling cocktail of other narcotics such as MDMA, methamphetamine, opioids and small amounts of cocaine, depending on whoever is brewing the batch, Palamar said.

The only ingredient that apparently won’t get users high is what gives the drug its distinctive pink color: food coloring.

“It’s the new mystery powder to hit nightclubs,” Palamar said.

“I think everybody’s concoction is going to be different from the next person’s.”

The candy-colored drug’s Latin American link isn’t just in its origin, but also in its association with the notorious Tren de Aragua gang from Venezuela that accused NYPD cop shooter Bernardo Raul Castro Mata, 19, said is smuggling guns into migrant shelters, according to authorities.

Jason Savino, the NYPD’s assistant chief of detectives, told Fox 5 last week that the gang has expanded into trafficking tusi. Police sources told The Post that Tren de Aragua-linked crooks are peddling tusi on Roosevelt Avenue street corners, a notorious open-air drug and prostitution market in Jackson Heights.

But other pink cocaine-peddling slime are homegrown, sources said.

Bradley Fernandez — a 36-year-old busted by NYPD cops in April on the Lower East Side with a half kilo of tusi, as well as cocaine and guns — had no known Tren de Aragua association, according to sources. He has pleaded not guilty to drug and firearms charges, court records show.

Tusi first popped up on the New York City’s Special Narcotics Prosecutor’s Office’s radar about 2023, when investigators that January stopped a Toyota Highlander in the Meatpacking District hauling a 10-pound bag of pink cocaine, officials said.

Since then, investigators with the office found that an Upper East Side woman, Deidra Jackson, brazenly advertised on the Telegram messaging app that she was selling tusi, authorities said.

“Toosi/Pink Coke” was one of 10 different drugs listed on a “menu” posted on Telegram by Jackson, according to a screenshot provided to The Post.

A probe by Homeland Security Investigations ended with a June 25 bust at Jackson’s York Avenue apartment, in which authorities arrested her and confiscated “cocaine and a pink powdery substance,” a criminal complaint states. Jackson pleaded not guilty and was ordered held on a $200,000 cash bond, authorities said.

NYPD sources said that tusi has another street-level nickname because of its association with a jet-setter: the “Diddy Drug.”

New York’s own Sean “Diddy” Combs’ penchant for pink cocaine was alleged in a high-profile civil lawsuit against the embattled hip-hop mogul.

His ex-girlfriend Yung Miami transported the drug for him on a private jet from Miami, Florida, to a Virginia music festival because “because “Sean Combs wanted tusi but Brendan [Paul, Diddy’s alleged drug mule] forgot it,” the lawsuit states.

Law enforcement sources said that tusi’s loosey-goosey combination of ingredients raise drug users’ ever-present risk of accidental overdose to new heights.

“We saw one drug dealer marketing two entirely different substances as ‘pink cocaine’: one, a mixture of cocaine, ketamine and MDMA dyed pink; another batch, ketamine alone,” said Bridget Brennan, the city’s special narcotics prosecutor, in a statement.

“What the seller calls the product may have no relationship to what it contains.”

Dealers could also mix fentanyl — a synthetic opioid commonly cut into cocaine and heroin, and linked to 200,000 overdose deaths since President Biden took office — into already free-wheeling tusi concoctions, an NYPD source said.

“We want to raise awareness, because that’s the next thing — it’s just a matter of time we see fentanyl make its way in there and it gets stepped on too many times,” Savino, the NYPD official, told The Post this week.

Ex-DEA official Donovan agreed: “It is not big yet, but the concern is that it will catch fire.”

Even without fentanyl, tusi use can lead to dangerous reactions, Palamar said, noting nightclub-goers can mistakenly think their “pink cocaine” will counteract the effects of alcohol.

Ketamine, the concoction’s primary ingredient, can be deadly when mixed with alcohol, he said.

“You literally don’t know what they’re putting in it,” Palamar said.