Krokodil Tears

[Luddly Neddite]

This is just beyond horrendous -

Before you click on the links, be aware that the photos are just awful and very graphic. Read the rest before deciding to click on the links.

True Life Horrors: The Russian Drug Krokodil | AnythingHorror Central

...

The drug is called “krokodil” because injecting it turns the skin scaly … almost immediately. But that’s only the beginning. It doesn’t take long for that scaly skin to turn to rotting flesh that literally falls off your body. “Flesh,” the article reports, “goes grey and peels away to leave bones exposed. People literally rot to death.” Holy shit!! This is why Brian above said “the living dead officially exist in Russian”!! Krokodil gives the user the appearance of being a zombie. Oh what’s that? Ya wanna kick krokodil? Well the main symptoms of heroin withdrawal last 5-10 days. After that the pain goes away. With krokodil the pain can last up to a MONTH, and apparently the pain is unbearable. People kicking the drug need powerful tranquilizers just to keep them from passing out from the withdrawal pain. This is some nasty shit!!

Krokodil: The Story Continues | AnythingHorror Central

KROKODIL TEARS, A NEW GROUND-BREAKING SERIES DOCUMENTING THE HEROIN EPIDEMIC OF SIBERIA

The newest bastard form of heroin, Krokodil, is decimating the Siberian youth, and nowhere is it more present than in the town of Novokuznetsk

NEW YORK, N.Y. (October 31, 2011) – VICE today announces its new series, Krokodil Tears, documenting the effects of Heroin’s new moonshine form, Krokodil, that is currently butchering the health and lives of its Siberian addicts. VICE travels to Novokuznetsk, Siberia to talk to the kids that are living the horrific lives of Krokodil-junkies, and to check out the area’s DIY coffin builders, religious cults disguised as rehab centers, and the effects the cheap alternative, made of suplhur, iodine and codeine, that eats its users from the inside out.

Check out the four-part series, Krokodil Tears, on VICE.COM: http://www.vice.com/vice-news/siberia- krokodil-tears-part-1

How long before its here in the US too?

 

[Luddly Neddite]

Krokodil: The flesh-eating drug that eats junkies - Europe - World - The Independent

Russia has more heroin users than any other country in the world – up to two million, according to unofficial estimates. For most, their lot is a life of crime, stints in prison, probable contraction of HIV and hepatitis C, and an early death. As efforts to stem the flow of Afghan heroin into Russia bring some limited success, and the street price of the drug goes up, for those addicts who can't afford their next hit, an even more terrifying spectre has raised its head.

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.

Has krokodil - the horrific street drug that rots the flesh of addicts ? made the switch from Russia to the US? - Europe - World - The Independent

Krokodil – the cheap heroin substitute that rots the flesh of addicts, usually killing them within two years – is believed to have made the switch to the US after a number of cases were reported in Arizona.

Officials in the state fear they may be seeing the beginning of an epidemic after two people in just one week attended hospitals suffering the devastating symptoms of the drug.

Krokodil – real name desomorphine - is an ultra-cheap heroin substitute that counts crushed codeine pills, gasoline, cooking oil, iodine, paint thinner and lighter fluid among its toxic ingredients.

The drug, which has become extremely popular in Russia in recent years, gets its name from the stench and reptilian texture it gives to an addict’s skin before it eventually eats it away completely, often leaving a user's bones exposed.

 

[Luddly Neddite]

If you don't already watch the Vice documentaries, they really are excellent.

Siberia: Krokodil Tears | VICE United States

 

[Katzndogz]

Legalize drugs. That will fix it.

 

[Gracie]

I'm sorry, but I have no pity on anyone that willingly injects such a drug for a temp high and knows the results of doing it.

 

[Luddly Neddite]

Whether drugs are "legal" or whether the person did it willingly isn't really the point.

We all pay for the effects of drugs.

 

[Nutz]

Krokodil Crock: How Rumors Of A 'Flesh-Eating Zombie Drug' Swept The Nation

By now you probably have heard that krokodil, a nasty homemade version of the narcotic painkiller desomorphine, is starting to catch on in the United States. Having eaten its way through the flesh of myriad Russian opiate addicts, the caustic concoction—notorious for the ghastly side effects caused by its corrosive contaminants, including abscesses and gangrene—is reportedly burning its way through Arizona, Texas, Nevada, Utah, Oklahoma, Colorado, Illinois, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. “The monster has crossed the ocean,” Time declared last month.

Like most monster stories, this tale of what CNN calls a “flesh-eating zombie drug” stalking the land does not appear to be true, as some reporters have begun to recognize. Yet others continue to hype an American krokodil craze that seems to exist only in the fevered imaginations of anti-drug propagandists and their journalistic accomplices. Just last week the Associated Press claimed doctors had confirmed that a Texas teenager’s skin lesions were caused by krokodil, and on Tuesday police in Lamar, Colorado, told reporters the drug had shown up there.

“A lot of people want to call it a trend, but we’re not seeing it,” says Joseph Moses, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). None of the people who supposedly injected krokodil have tested positive for desomorphine, and neither have any of the putative krokodil samples analyzed by the DEA. In fact, Moses says, “I’m not aware of any forensic laboratory that has come up with a desomorphine sample.” Instead he sees “a lot of hype” and “a lot of gruesome imagery”—the obligatory pictures of Russian addicts displaying gaping wounds and rotting flesh.

The reporters sounding the alarm about this alleged Russian drug invasion are undeterred by the complete lack of toxicological evidence. Nor have they stopped to wonder why there would be a market for krokodil in the United States. Russian junkies turned to krokodil, which they made by mixing codeine with chemicals such as gasoline, red phosphorus, and hydrochloric acid, because heroin was scarce and codeine was available over the counter. Since neither of those conditions applies in the United States, where heroin is readily available and codeine requires a prescription, why would krokodil appeal to American drug users? Because they were curious to see what “rotting from the inside out” was like? And if users are not knowingly injecting krokodil, why would dealers go to the trouble of surreptitiously replacing heroin with it when the real stuff is cheap and plentiful? “It’s unlikely that we would see that shift,” Moses observes, “when other substances are available.”

Major news organizations have not let the implausibility of an American krokodil outbreak get in the way of a good drug scare. Last September, when Frank LoVecchio, co-director of the Banner Good Samaritan Poison and Drug Information Center in Phoenix, said local hospitals had treated two people for “symptoms consistent with krokodil use” (as The Arizona Republic put it), USA Today immediately jumped on the story. “Flesh-Rotting ‘Krokodil’ Drug Emerges in USA,” the paper announced in an article by Michael Winter that relied entirely on LoVecchio’s speculation to substantiate that claim.

Those two Arizona cases were never confirmed by toxicological tests, and neither were any of the subsequently reported cases. “Symptoms consistent with krokodil use,” such as lesions, necrosis, and scarring, are also consistent with unsanitary injections of heroin or other drugs, which may contain contaminants that pose additional hazards. Even when intravenous drug users report that they have injected krokodil, they have no way of knowing for sure what was in the stuff they bought—a perennial pitfall of the black market.

CNN ignored these subtleties in a widely circulated October 16 story that endorsed the narrative of an American krokodil outbreak. “A flesh-eating drug that turns people into zombie-like creatures seems to have made its way to the United States,” Jen Christensen reported under the headline “Flesh-Eating ‘Zombie’ Drug ‘Kills You From the Inside Out.’” The story relied heavily on Abhin Singla, director of addiction services at the Presence St. Joseph Medical Center in Joliet, Illinois. Singla, who supplied the headline quotes, was convinced he had come across five patients with krokodil-related symptoms. So were some local news outlets.

By contrast, Chicago Tribune reporter Andy Grimm was appropriately skeptical from the beginning, and on October 27 he published a story debunking Singla’s claims under the headline “Suspected Krokodil a False Alarm: Negative Tests Lead to More Doubt That Drug Is in the U.S.” What about the “”festering, pungent sore” that an Ohio sheriff attributed to krokodil in November? Last month Henry Spiller, director of the Central Ohio Poison Center, deemed the report spurious, telling The Columbus Dispatch “there is no krokodil” in Ohio or any other state. A report of a krokodil-related death in Oklahoma likewise proved to be unfounded. “It was just a drug overdose,” a spokesman for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics said, “and nothing in [his] system [was] consistent with krokodil.” That quote, in fact, appeared halfway through CNN’s breathless account of the emerging krokodil epidemic.

Although such clues did not faze CNN, they gave rise to a December 10 story on WAVE, the NBC affiliate in Louisville, headlined “Krokodil in Kentuckiana: Urban Threat or Urban Legend?” The segment leaned decidedly toward the latter explanation, concluding that “aspects of krokodil’s United States invasion appear to be a myth—one that spread from the Internet to network television.” WAVE reporter Eric Flack’s skepticism was especially striking given the way drug scares are usually treated on the local news.

Flack noted that a report by two St. Louis doctors who claimed to have treated a man with krokodil-related symptoms, published online by The American Journal of Medicine in November, was removed from the journal’s website a week later after the paper received strong scientific criticism. The journal’s editor said the article, which according to its authors was the first such case report involving an American patient to be published by a medical journal, had been removed because of privacy concerns. But he conceded that “not all MDs agree that this is a proven case of krokodil syndrome.” One reason for that disagreement: As with all the other krokodil sightings in the U.S., there was no toxicological confirmation.

The pattern here is familiar from other drug scares, such as the 2012 story about the guy who supposedly was driven to eat a man’s face by “bath salts” he did not take. Reckless claims by doctors and cops are picked up by the press, which encourages new reckless claims, which leads to more sensational coverage, and so on. No matter how many times they are debunked, the stories persist because they appeal to the same impulses that send people to horror movies or make them slow down to gawk when they pass a car crash. People are fascinated by gruesome imagery, and they want to believe in monsters.

 

[Luddly Neddite]

I hope that's true cuz the photos are horrifying.

Thanks for posting this.

 

[Gracie]

I didn't look at the links. Don't plan to either.

 

[Nutz]

I hope that's true cuz the photos are horrifying.

Thanks for posting this.

The photos are VERY horrifying.

 

[September]

"Religious cults disguised as rehab centers"

Interesting

 

[Mr. H.]

Vodka... the original Russian gateway drug.

 

[srlip]

good riddance to weak, stupid people. Hope it becomes a BIG hit in the US, too.

 

[Noomi]

If people are dumb enough to take it, knowing the side effects, too bad - and they shouldn't be entitled to any medical treatment, either.