Pink cocaine has almost no cocaine in it — and usually no 2C-B either

Pink cocaine sounds like a designer upgrade to the ordinary white stuff. It is usually neither pink cocaine nor the drug it is named after. Lab after lab that has put the powder under a spectrometer keeps finding the same unglamorous answer: mostly ketamine and MDMA, dyed pink — and almost never any cocaine, or any 2C-B.

What the labs actually find in pink cocaine

The Spanish drug-checking service Energy Control analysed 470 samples sold as tusi or pink cocaine between 2020 and 2024: ketamine turned up in 93.2% of them and MDMA in 92.1%, while 2C-B — the compound the name gestures at — appeared in just 3.6%. In Colombia, the analysis project Échele Cabeza tested 162 samples and detected 2C-B in only three. And in a 2025 Miami-Dade medical-examiner case series of fourteen powders linked to eight deaths, every single sample contained ketamine and not one contained 2C-B.

So where is the cocaine?

Usually nowhere. The “cocaine” is branding, not chemistry. What is actually in the bag is typically a ketamine-and-MDMA blend, often stretched with caffeine and sometimes carrying methamphetamine, synthetic cathinones, or other additions — and the proportions shift from batch to batch. DEA laboratory testing tells the same story from the enforcement side: of roughly 960 seized pink-powder samples it examined, only four contained any 2C-B at all.

Why the mixture is the real story

Here the joke stops, because the mixture is where the danger lives. Pink cocaine routinely combines a dissociative anaesthetic (ketamine) with a stimulant-empathogen (MDMA), plus whatever else was on hand — a pharmacology that pulls the body in opposite directions and changes with every purchase. You cannot dose what you cannot identify, and two pink powders that look identical can behave nothing alike. That unpredictability, not any single ingredient, is what sends people to emergency rooms.

The bottom line

Pink cocaine is a brand, not a formula. The colour is the only reliable ingredient. If you want to understand what a specific powder might do, the honest starting point is that no one can tell from the name — which is exactly why the name is so misleading.