Liam Payne Investigation: How Pink Cocaine Affects You?

On October 16, the 31-year-old singer Liam Payne, famed for the boy band One Direction died of a fall from the balcony of the Casasur Palermo Hotel in Buenos Aires, as confirmed by the Policia Federal Argentina.

Liam Payne Was Struggling With Mental His Mental Health

Payne had always been vocal about his mental health and his issues with addiction even before his death. He explained that it was difficult to deal with so much face and so he used alcohol to cope with it. "There have been a lot of people in trouble with mental health that aren’t really getting the help that they need, and I think that’s a bit of a problem in our industry," he said in an interview with Men's Health Australia in 2019. However, he also said that he was lucky to get back into a sense of normality.

In 2023, he also announced six months of sobriety and told his fans in a YouTube video that he'd spend 100 days in a rehab facility in Louisiana. He also said that it was a Hans Zimmer concert in January 2023, that inspired him to give up drinking.

"I watching this beautiful symphony, I was having a drink, and I thought, 'You know what? This isn't really serving me at all. I don't really need this right now,' It's the first time I've ever put a drink down and gone to someone else, 'You finish this, I don't need this right now.' And I haven't picked one up since, which has almost been six months, which I'm excited about," he said.

In an episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast in 2021, Payne said that he even experienced suicidal thoughts during his time in One Direction.

"I was worried how far my rock bottom was going to be," he said. "Where's rock bottom for me? And you would never have seen it. I'm very good at hiding it. No one would ever have seen it... There is some stuff that I have definitely never, never spoken about. It was really, really, really severe. And it was a problem. And it was only until I saw myself after that, I was like, 'Right, I need to fix myself," he said.

Payne also said that he had become "somebody he did not really recognise anymore".

Liam Payne's Death And Pink Cocaine

While he talked about his sobriety, the hotel reported a different scene. His death is under investigation, however, there are reports that drugs like paraphernalia, unknown powder, and anti-anxiety medications were found in his room. As per the toxicology results, a cocktail of drugs, "pink cocaine", ketamine (also related to Matthew Perry's death), MDMA, and methamphetamine were also found in his system.

The police have suggested that a drug-induced hallucination may have caused the fall, but have not yet confirmed anything.

As per the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Use, pink cocaine is a powdery mixture of ketamine, methamphetamine, and MDMA (locally known as molly), and it may not actually contain cocaine as the name suggests. It gets its pink colour from food colouring.

How Does Pink Cocaine Affect Your Body?

Everyone's body reacts differently to drug cocktails, and since pink cocaine is a micture of many drugs and street drugs, therefore, body's reaction can vary.

A report by NBC News, quotes Bridget Brennan, the special narcotics prosecutor for New York, "To begin with, you don’t know what the substance is, but secondly, people don’t all react the same way to any drugs. This stuff is not manufactured under pharmaceutical conditions, there’s no certainty to it. It’s a crapshoot any time you take any street drugs."

While the side effects vary, it can include anxiety, hallucination, nausea, vomiting, increased heart rate and blood pressure and elevated body temperature.

Right before Payne's death, a hotel receptionist also reported to 911 about a distressed guest who was intoxicated and was "breaking the whole room". The caller also said that the guest was "in a room that has a balcony, and, well, we are a little afraid that he might do something life-threatening".

An autopsy found that the singer had 25 injuries which were compatible with those produced by a fall from height and as per the Argentina National Prosecutor's Office, his cause of death was, "poly traumatism, internal and external haemorrhage".