Newest Most Deadly Drug Krokodil (Zombie Drug)

January 2, 0214 / News

Krokodil is the newest most deadly drug trend that has just recently entered the borders of the United States. The drug was first discovered in Russia in 2002 and just recently (September 2013) surfaced in the US (Arizona, Illinois, Ohio, Oklahoma) and Canada. The life of a desomorphine addict is much shorter than any other drug – two years maximum. Some may take five years, but many people die after taking their first dose of this drug.

Addicts pay dearly for krokodil’s cheap high. Wherever on the body the drug is injected blood vessels burst and surrounding tissue dies, sometimes falling off the bone in chunks. Gangrene and amputations are a common result, while porous bone tissue, especially in the lower jaw, often starts to disintegrate, eaten up by the drug’s acidity. That side effect has earned krokodil its other nickname: the zombie drug. The typical life span of an addict is just two or three years.

The drug quickly became popular among Russian addicts. In 2005, the country’s counternarcotics agency reported catching only “one-off” instances of the drug; six years later, in the first three months of 2011, the agency confiscated 65 million doses, up 23-fold from two years earlier. At its peak that year, krokodil use had spread to as many as a million addicts in Russia.

The krokodil epidemic may have peaked in Russia, but the drug’s use has already been reported elsewhere. In October, a report published online in the American Journal of Medicine confirmed the case of a 30-year-old addict in Richmond Heights, Mo., whose finger “fell off” and whose skin began to rot after he began injecting krokodil. The monster has crossed the ocean.

Officials hope that the drug’s main ingredient, codeine, being a controlled substance in the United States, will make it too hard to obtain.  That doesn’t mean desperate addicts won’t tweak the recipe according to what is available to them, possibly making the final product even more dangerous.