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First Cases of Flesh-Eating Drug Emerge In the United States
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Having spent the last decade wreaking havoc in Russia, a flesh-eating drug called Krokodil has arrived in Arizona, reports Eliza Gray at Time Magazine. The Banner Poison Control Center has reported the first two users of the drug which makes user's skin scaly and green before it rots away [Warning: Graphic Images]. Made of codeine, a painkiller often used in cough syrup, and a mix of other materials including gasoline, paint thinner, and alcohol, Krokodil become popular in Russia because it costs 20 times less than heroin and can be made easily at home. Also known as Desomorphine, Krokodil has sedative and analgesic effects, and is around 8-10 times more potent than morphine. When the drug is injected, it rots the skin by rupturing blood vessels, causing the tissue to die. As a result, the skin hardens and rots, sometimes even falling off to expose the bone. 'These people are the ultimate in self-destructive drug addiction,' says Dr. Ellen Marmur. 'Once you are an addict at this level, any rational thinking doesn't apply.' The average life span of a Krokodil user is two to three years, according to a 2011 TIME investigation of the drug's prevalence in Russia."
Seems to be a somewhat self-limiting problem. Users will die off fairly rapidly.
Legalize heroin.
So where do the side effects (of rotting skin, etc.) come from? The active ingredient itself?
If not, this is in fact a strong argument against blanket-banning of drugs (a long-term favorite of US and US-backed international policy makers), since criminalising encourages home making, impure drugs, uncontrollable use, and so on, and so forth.
The alternative is to decriminalise use, then regulate, and make sure people who lose themselves in drugs get the help they need to get back on their feet. Like Portugal did, and does. But the US won't like that because then it can't go on waging war on drugs. And that would cut into the DEA's playtime. Can't have that, now can we?
If we treated addiction like the disease it is instead of moralizing it as a crime, we could help these people become productive members of society again instead of driving them to slow suicide. If safe drugs were available in free clinics and addicts received treatment, nobody would choose krokodil, nobody would be robbed for drug money, gangs would have one less source of funding, and these victims would be able to overcome their disease.
Something needs to be made clear. Desomorphine itself does not rot flesh. With a little extra work the solution can be purified and there are users that DO take the time to do this. It's when the solution is simply thrown together and 'cooked down' that health problems occur. Street level users making it on their own don't take the time to purify it.
The Blade Itself
It is not the drug (desomorphine) that kills, it is the impurities, mostly silica put into the codeine pills to poison people who try to make illicit drugs out of them. It is the government that is killing people by requiring these adulterants.
You're missing something ...
Krokodil is NOT for those wanting to get high/stoned/whatever for cheaps.
It is a drug for when everything else is just not cutting it anymore.
It is a drug for when nothing in life really matter, besides the next fix.
It is a drug for when you've accepted that you're going to die from drugs.
Krokodil is the thing users turn to when everything else has been tried, when all there is left is the pain and the high and when you're beyond the regular kind of drug-addict-gone-fucked-up.
"Dumb" has nothing, what-so-ever, to do with it.
I saw an independent Australian documentary on Krokodil in one of the southern Russian cities, like Novobirisk. The addicts (in theit teens or twenties) figured they had about a week to live, and cared about nothing, living in a garbage pile in an abandoned building. The film crew tried to observe a drug buy, but ended up being chased by someone who spotted them. It was a incredibly sad, terrifying film.
For their part, Russian officials are claiming that the Taliban is shipping cheap drugs north across the steppes in an attempt to corrupt and destabilize their cities.
I'm all for legalization of a lot of substances and ending the Violence Due To Illegalization, but this one is so over-the-top in terms of both addiction and toxicity that I don't know what a rational response could be.
John
Obligatory: you don't know shit about the decision-making process of addicts. These aren't idiots fouling the gene pool. You're no smarter. Ignorant judgmental creeps like you should be culled from the gene pool -- we'd all be in a better if trivial levels of compassion were among "common sense".
Treat addiction like the disease it is, and it goes away. Encouraging addicts to off themselves only puts money into the pockets of the crooked assholes who peddle these drugs, exacerbating the problem. This drains the resources of the host society, reduces the available talent pool for the arts and sciences, and guess who can't afford birth control: addicts.
Self-righteous assholes like you are what got us to this place to begin with. May your ignorant worldview fuck off and die.
I actually read through that discussion, and believe it or not, he has a decent point, though it wasn't immediately evident. He eventually explained what the purpose of the exercise was, as well as his own stances on the issues. And contrary to his initial, inflammatory remarks, he seems like he's actually a rather rational and coherent individual who simply wanted to illustrate a problem in the most direct way possible.
For instance, he never suggested that the drug should be legalized or that climbing Everest should be outlawed (quite the opposite, in fact), though people assumed that was what he intended. Rather, his point was that we, as a society, have lost much of our capacity for evaluating risk, since the rhetoric we choose to apply to certain topics is blowing the risks involved out of proportion and blinding us to how dangerous they actually are. To demonstrate that, he made some blanket statements about climbing Everest using the sort of rhetoric that is typically reserved for describing dangerous behavior that is frowned upon, such as drug abuse. To say the least, the reaction he got was predictable: outrage, dismissal, the construction of straw men, and ad hominem attacks, rather than rational rebuttals to the facts and logic he was providing.
His point wasn't that climbing Everest should be outlawed because it is too dangerous, nor that the drugs should be legalized because there are other things we allow that are more dangerous. He was simply asking people to think critically about how the way that we present risks and have been trained to think about certain topics has colored our perceptions. I actually thought he had a rather good point, and that he did a great job of demonstrating the problem by placing himself in a position where the other commenters would construct straw men to tear down while vilifying him as a horrible person.
In truth, I actually thought it was something a lot of people here on Slashdot would appreciate, rather than something they'd laugh at, since we're supposed to value facts and truth over rhetoric and soundbites, though, at least taken out of context, I can see why it'd be seen as ridiculous. I actually started reading the discussion just because I wanted to see how ridiculous the raving lunatic would get, but then I found out that he was anything but what I had initially thought of him.