tom.ch
Member
I'm well aware that this is fucking long and most people won't actually wanna read it all so...
It's a home made alternative to heroin that poor Russians have resorted to for their fix and it basically rots them from the outside. Google image search 'Krokodil' for a disturbing photo or two that might make you sleep different.
Oleg 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."
It's a home made alternative to heroin that poor Russians have resorted to for their fix and it basically rots them from the outside. Google image search 'Krokodil' for a disturbing photo or two that might make you sleep different.
Oleg 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."
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