On Aug 8, 12:00 pm, Travis <baconl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> **
> <http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/author/eowyn2/> Warning: New
> Synthetic Opiate "Krokodil" Rots Away
> Flesh<http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/2011/08/08/warning-new-synthet...>
> *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...>
>
> 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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