That is possibly the second grossest medical condition one can search for images of on the Internet.
(Since someone is bound to ask, the worst is Fournier Gangrene. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.)
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It seems like it’s not the drug itself causing the flesh destruction, but that users are not using sterile techniques and the injection sites are becoming infected. Can anyone clarify?
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I remain cautiously skeptical. From weed to crack to cake, the journalists as a group do not have a great rep for researching drug stories, and the police in general have a worse reputation for exaggerating or outright fabricating when it come to drugs.
Vice did an article about Krokodil, and I actually trust Vice on the subject of drugs. Their description of Krokodil convinces me that it is real, and that no one with other options would ever inject it. But I am not certain that the images attributed to Krokodil aren’t just unrelated medical catastrophes that someone has slapped the name Krokodil on.
But, basically, to get certainty about the whole flesh-falling-off-limbs thing, I’d want to hear it from, say, the NEJM
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Wikipedia indicates that the main problem is that it is quite easy to make, so people with minimal chemistry knowledge/experience are making it themselves, then not purifying it at all before injecting
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As someone who lives in the Northeast, where drug users are delightfully behind the curve and still haven’t taken up meth, I could share your sanguine attitude. But it’s best not to.
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So why’s it in Phoenix? Is codeine OTC in Mexico?
You can get it over the counter in Canada as well, but only as a mixture of acetaminophen, codeine, and caffeine. Do they sell just pure codeine over the counter in Russia?
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There are a couple articles on pubmed, but none have free full text available:
Google ‘cold water extraction’.
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That I’m not sure of. The articles I’ve read simply state ‘codeine’, so it could either be a relatively pure form of the drug or an aspirin/caffeine mix like you’re describing.
This isn’t anything new, sadly.
Back in the day, there was this little thing called Prohibition. So what did people do when they wanted a drink and couldn’t get theirs hands on smuggled legit stuff? They made it themselves, or bought it from someone who made it themselves.
Bathtub Gin, killed plenty of folks.
So today’s lesson - if you ban something, but can’t completely enforce that ban, all you do is make it more dangerous. That goes for drugs, medical procedures, ideas, lots of stuff.
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Amber butane. Of the Amber Butane Corps.
That’s generally the problem with a lot of synthetic drugs - including meth, heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, etc… On their own, at known strength, at pharmaceutical-grade purity, and where any dilution is done with pharmaceutical-grade safe adjuncts, those drugs are surprisingly safe to users - not that it would be good idea to take them up even if you had access to such a supply.
But the overwhelming hazards of the street forms come largely from the stuff that isn’t the actual drug - chemical remnants of manufacturing by people who don’t care about user safety, dilution to unknown and sometimes wildly inconsistent degrees by a series of middle-men, and particularly with E, outright substitution for a wholly unrelated and invariably more dangerous drug.
It’s almost like a perfectly predictable result of prohibition, or something.
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In France at least, pharmacists have the discretion to issue codeine without other drugs mixed in. My wife had a bad cough, we went to a pharmacy for some cough suppressant, and what we got was plain codeine syrup.
Not chemically pure in that case of course - it was a syrup so probably something over 99% sugar. I don’t know what other forms might be available.
Addiction is driving them. I suppose you think addicts should just “get over it”, though.
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I agree with the cautious skepticism on what the chances of having your limbs fall off in a horrific manner are. Sadly we are used to the lies being spread in the name of the war on drugs like the fact that marijuana is schedule 1 and must be really, really dangerous It would be good if we had a drug policy based on facts instead of politics and fact based education rather than draconian enforcement.
For all intents and purposes, you are. Making Krok is like cooking meth, so you’re getting petroleum products when you take a hit.
If you google some of the videos of people addicted to Krok (NSFW, NSFL), you’d see that they’d make great zombies.
That’s actually not quite true. Most cases of contamination/poisonings from prohibition era bootleg alcohol or moonshine were the result of deliberate adulteration. Either alcohol intended as a solvent getting denatured with methanol to deter people from drinking it, or bootleggers adulterating their product to stretch it or mimic some property of a legit product (EG formaldehyde, caramel color, or other products added to clear whiskey to mimic the texture, color and flavor of real Scotch). In a couple of cases the Prohibition authorities actually re-released seized alcohol after tainting it in order to negatively effect the reputation of illicit booze and deter people from seeking it out. Then there’s the whole Jake thing which is a bit closer:
Basically most of your bad alcohol at that point was deliberately made less safe for one reason or another. Its actually relatively difficult to make a dangerous/poisonous product by just distilling a fermented base.
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Side effects of Krokodil include skin irritation, headache, nausea, addiction, leprosy, organ failure, vomiting, vomiting of your entire gastrointestinal tract, brain damage, necrosis, gas gangrene, amputations, death, undeath, craving of the flesh of the living, and constipation.
Ask your doctor if Krokodil is right for you.
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