I'm not in favor of the default purple color and "cherry cream" font on this site, so this will be Arial and gray. Not exciting, but I can read it this way.
I was browsing a website called Reddit when I came across a link to an article titled "You can now add flesh eating cocaine and krokodil opiate to the basket of the world's most dangerous drugs".
It is yet another drug that can be made easily from common items, such as gasoline, paint thinner, and codeine (which can be purchased as a painkiller at pharmacies). Reports say that Krokodil (russian for crocodile) is 10 times as potent as heroin, yet 3 times cheaper. Of course, this already sounds like a major problem: one would think that the overdose rates would increase drastically. Surprisingly, overdosing is not even close to the major risk of injecting Krokodil. Side effects include the skin turning green and scaly (like a crocodile's) and blood vessels popping, which leads to the rotting and falling off of flesh/tissue. Other effects include blood poisoning, meningitis, pneumonia, brain rotting (which leads to speech impediment), and arteries bursting in the heart. See the pictures in the second link at the bottom if you dare.
Worse yet, reports claim that 5% of Russia's drug users are on Krokodil. That means that 100,000 people have fallen into the addiction, only in Russia.
The question that I instantly asked was why would someone do this to themselves? I still do not know. I assume that most of them were previously addicted to heroin, without money, and needed to please their addiction.
If I had to pinpoint a single cause of this epidemic, I would say it is drug prohibition. Using basic logic, I would say "heroin is bad, therefore it should be illegal". However, people always find a way around the law (especially in the drug world), and Krokodil is a prime example of that. If heroin were legalized (I cringe at that thought, but...) krokodil would be much less of a problem.
I once saw a video documentary about a free heroin dispensary run by the Swiss government. Not only is it free, it's also 100% pure, and in controlled amounts. Having this dispensary there reduced the number of overdoses, murders, HIV infections, and prostitution (from addicts selling themselves for the drug) in the area. Once the heroin users are isolated, they can be isolated and then detoxed, which usually takes about one week (as opposed to krokodil, with a 4 week withdrawal and extreme pain which must be balanced with extremely heavy tranquilizers).
The reason the author, Simon Schuster, wrote this article was simply to inform. Krokodil is relatively recent news but the number of people it affects every day increases exponentially. We must address this problem before it is too late.
Here's the time article: link
And here's another article with quite a few gruesome pictures of the drug's effects and a video (beware...): link
2 comments:
This article caught my attention immediately. i began to think about who was the first person to create it and why? if its affecting people exponetially we should soon expect it in america right? so shouldnt this cause us to be looking for ways to block the Side effects for example Narcam is used for heroin addicts in the case of an overdose so what preventive measures do we have for this deadly drug. thank you for the post it was informative.
This is a really disturbing article, but it poses a really interesting question which you sort of toyed with in your response. It's hard to find a solution, because a lot of things that cause major drug use like this are the overarching world issues that will probably continue to haunt for ever, like poverty, depression, etc. I don't know however, if legalizing heroin would necessarily be the solution we're looking for. I doubt that krokodil users' big beef with heroin use is that it's illegal. To have gotten hooked in the first place, they must have abandoned the question of legality long ago. As you mentioned, many of those who resorted to krokodil, probably just couldn't afford heroin. Were the drug legal, the price would likely say the same, and people would continue to find thrifty ways of getting around that. On the other hand, its often thought that legalizing a substance like heroin would allow us to more easily regulate it. Perhaps if it was legal, less people would become addicted, thus less would resort to krokodil. I still don't know if that would work though, if you look at Prohibition, an example of when regulation had a very minimal effect on alcohol consumption. Though alcohol is a far more shared vice than heroin, the illegal drug trade is already a thriving business, and would probably have little problems with continuing to ignore whatever regulations we put in place. It seems like something should be done to stop the fleshrotting drug fad, but I'm fresh out of ideas.
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