**
<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/author/eowyn2/> Warning: New
Synthetic Opiate "Krokodil" Rots Away
Flesh<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/2011/08/08/warning-new-synthetic-opiate-krokodil-rots-away-flesh/>
*Eowyn <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/author/eowyn2/>* | August 8,
2011 at 4:00 am | Tags:
desomorphine<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=desomorphine>,
drug addiction <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=drug-addiction>,
heroin addicts <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=heroin-addicts>,
Russia <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?tag=russia> | Categories:
crime <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?cat=34945349>, God's
creation<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?cat=354016>,
Health Care <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?cat=20052>, Just Plain
Nuts <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/?cat=2053694> | URL:
http://wp.me/pKuKY-8xy
Russians are committing suicide via drug addiction. The country has more
heroin users than any country in the world. Now, Russians are turning to a
deadly synthetic opiate -- a desomorphine nicknamed "Krokodil" (crocodile)
-- which they concoct in their kitchen sink.
No doubt Krokodil will soon arrive on America's shores, if it hasn't
already.
H/t my friend Sol.
*~Eowyn*
[image: A heroin user prepares the drug in Zhukovsky, near Moscow]*A heroin
user prepares the drug in Zhukovsky, near Moscow* Krokodil: The drug that
eats
junkies<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/krokodil-the-drug-that-eats-junkies-2300787.html>
A home-made heroin substitute is having a horrific effect on thousands of
Russia's drug addicts
By Shaun Walker - UK's The Independent - June 22, 2011Oleg glances furtively
around him and, confident that nobody is watching, slips inside the entrance
to a decaying Soviet-era block of flats, where Sasha is waiting for him.
Ensconced in the dingy kitchen of one of the apartments, they empty the
contents of a blue carrier bag that Oleg has brought with him – painkillers,
iodine, lighter fluid, industrial cleaning oil, and an array of vials,
syringes, and cooking implements.
Half an hour later, after much boiling, distilling, mixing and shaking, what
remains is a caramel-coloured gunge held in the end of a syringe, and the
acrid smell of burnt iodine in the air. Sasha fixes a dirty needle to the
syringe and looks for a vein in his bruised forearm. After some time, he
finds a suitable place, and hands the syringe to Oleg, telling him to inject
the fluid. He closes his eyes, and takes the hit.
*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.
"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."
*Heroin addiction kills 30,000 people per year in Russia – a third of global
deaths from the drug* – but now there is the added problem of krokodil. Mr
Ivanov recalled a recent visit to a drug-treatment centre in Western
Siberia. "They told me that two years ago almost all their drug users used
heroin," said the drugs tsar. "Now, more than half of them are on
desomorphine."
He estimates that overall, *around 5 per cent of Russian drug users are on
krokodil and other home-made drugs, which works out at about 100,000 people.
It's a huge, hidden epidemic* – worse in the really isolated parts of Russia
where supplies of heroin are patchy – but palpable even in cities such as
Tver.
It has a population of half a million, and is a couple of hours by train
from Moscow, en route to St Petersburg. Its city centre, sat on the River
Volga, is lined with pretty, Tsarist-era buildings, but the suburbs are
miserable. People sit on cracked wooden benches in a weed-infested "park",
gulping cans of Jaguar, an alcoholic energy drink. In the background, there
are rows of crumbling apartment blocks. The shops and restaurants of Moscow
are a world away; for a treat, people take the bus to the McDonald's by the
train station.
In the city's main drug treatment centre, Artyom Yegorov talks of the
devastation that krokodil is causing. "*Desomorphine causes the strongest
levels of addiction, and is the hardest to cure*," says the young doctor,
sitting in a treatment room in the scruffy clinic, below a picture of Hugh
Laurie as Dr House.
"With heroin withdrawal, the main symptoms last for five to 10 days. After
that there is still a big danger of relapse but the physical pain will be
gone. With krokodil, the pain can last up to a month, and it's unbearable.
They have to be injected with extremely strong tranquilisers just to keep
them from passing out from the pain."
Dr Yegorov says krokodil users are instantly identifiable because of their
smell. "It's that smell of iodine that infuses all their clothes," he says.
"There's no way to wash it out, all you can do is burn the clothes. Any flat
that has been used as a krokodil cooking house is best forgotten about as a
place to live. You'll never get that smell out of the flat."
*Addicts in Tver say they never have any problems buying the key ingredient
for krokodil – codeine pills, which are sold without prescription. *"Once I
was trying to buy four packs, and the woman told me they could only sell two
to any one person," recalls one, with a laugh. "So I bought two packs, then
came back five minutes later and bought another two. Other than that, they
never refuse to sell it to us, even though they know what we're going to do
with it." The *solution, to many, is obvious: ban the sale of codeine
tablets, or at least make them prescription-only. But despite the
authorities being aware of the problem for well over a year, nothing has
been done. *
President Dmitry Medvedev has called for websites which explain how to make
krokodil to be closed down, but he has not ordered the banning of the pills.
Last month, a spokesman for the ministry of health said that there were
plans to make codeine-based tablets available only on prescription, but that
it was impossible to introduce the measure quickly. *Opponents claim
lobbying by pharmaceutical companies has caused the inaction.*
"A year ago we said that we need to introduce prescriptions," says Mr
Ivanov. "These tablets don't cost much but the profit margins are high. Some
pharmacies make up to 25 per cent of their profits from the sale of these
tablets. It's not in the interests of pharmaceutical companies or pharmacies
themselves to stop this, so the government needs to use its power to
regulate their sale."
In addition to krokodil, there are reports of drug users injecting other
artificial mixes, and* the latest street drug is tropicamide. Used as eye
drops by ophthalmologists to dilate the pupils during eye examinations, *Dr
Yegorov says patients have no trouble getting hold of capsules of it for
about £2 per vial.* Injected, the drug has severe psychiatric effects and
brings on suicidal feelings.*
"Addicts are being sold drugs by normal Russian women working in pharmacies,
who know exactly what they'll be used for," said Yevgeny Roizman, an
anti-drugs activist who was one of the first to talk publicly about the
krokodil issue earlier this year. "Selling them to boys the same age as
their own sons. Russians are killing Russians."
Zhenya, quietly spoken and wearing dark glasses, agrees to tell his story
while I sit in the back of his car in a lay-by on the outskirts of Tver. He
managed to kick the habit, after spending weeks at a detox clinic
,experiencing horrendous withdrawal symptoms that included seizures, a
40-degree temperature and vomiting. He lost 14 teeth after his gums rotted
away, and contracted hepatitis C.
But his fate is essentially a miraculous escape – after all, he's still
alive. Zhenya is from a small town outside Tver, and was a heroin addict for
a decade before he moved onto krokodil a year ago. Of the ten friends he
started injecting heroin with a decade ago, seven are dead.
Unlike heroin, where the hit can last for several hours,* a krokodil high
only lasts between 90 minutes and two hours, says Zhenya. Given that the
"cooking" process takes at least half an hour, being a krokodil addict is
basically a full-time job.*
"I remember one day, we cooked for three days straight," says one of
Zhenya's friends. "You don't sleep much when you're on krokodil, as you need
to wake up every couple of hours for another hit. At the time we were
cooking it at our place, and loads of people came round and pitched in. For
three days we just kept on making it. By the end, we all staggered out
yellow, exhausted and stinking of iodine."
In Tver, most krokodil users inject the drug only when they run out of money
for heroin. As soon as they earn or steal enough, they go back to heroin. In
other more isolated regions of Russia, where heroin is more expensive and
people are poorer, the problem is worse. People become full-time krokodil
addicts, giving them a life expectancy of less than a year.
Zhenya says every single addict he knows in his town has moved from heroin
to krokodil, because it's cheaper and easier to get hold of. "You can feel
how disgusting it is when you're doing it," he recalls. "You're dreaming of
heroin, of something that feels clean and not like poison. But you can't
afford it, so you keep doing the krokodil. Until you die."
*Some of the names in this story have been changed*
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