Krokodil, the drug that eats junkies
Apparently those Russkies have been using homemade drugs to replace heroin.. The ingredients? Iodine, pain killers, cleaning oil and lighter fluid. The crazy thing about this is that it apparently causes the skin to rot away quite quickly, especially if these buffoons miss the vein. While it's sort of deserving for these freaks that shoot up things like cleaning oil and iodine, the effects of it are quite disturbing as this description from The Independent describes:
Quote:
The home-made drug that Oleg and Sasha inject is known as krokodil, or "crocodile". It is desomorphine, a synthetic opiate many times more powerful than heroin that is created from a complex chain of mixing and chemical reactions, which the addicts perform from memory several times a day. While heroin costs from £20 to £60 per dose, desomorphine can be "cooked" from codeine-based headache pills that cost £2 per pack, and other household ingredients available cheaply from the markets.
It is a drug for the poor, and its effects are horrific. It was given its reptilian name because its poisonous ingredients quickly turn the skin scaly. Worse follows. Oleg and Sasha have not been using for long, but Oleg has rotting sores on the back of his neck.
"If you miss the vein, that's an abscess straight away," says Sasha. Essentially, they are injecting poison directly into their flesh. One of their friends, in a neighbouring apartment block, is further down the line.
"She won't go to hospital, she just keeps injecting. Her flesh is falling off and she can hardly move anymore," says Sasha. Photographs of late-stage krokodil addicts are disturbing in the extreme. Flesh goes grey and peels away to leave bones exposed. People literally rot to death.
Russian heroin addicts first discovered how to make krokodil around four years ago, and there has been a steady rise in consumption, with a sudden peak in recent months. "Over the past five years, sales of codeine-based tablets have grown by dozens of times," says Viktor Ivanov, the head of Russia's Drug Control Agency. "It's pretty obvious that it's not because everyone has suddenly developed headaches."
There's a video floating around the internet showing some of the poor saps who've been using for a short while. At the end of one video there is a woman in a doctors office moaning in pain as they show her arm missing about 40% of skin and muscle exposing the bone, the doctor then tapped on her bone with a metallic instrument.. it made quite an eerie and sickening sound.
Here's a news report showing some of the effects (note: this is not the same video as I described above, you can find that video by googling "krokodil video", it's actually the link from Morrison News.)
Warning: this does contain some graphic scenes of rotting flesh, so if you are squeamish you should probably skip this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QLH2p5zxz8
