Wednesday, November 16, 2011

OMG . . .


FIRST THERE WAS "METH MOUTH", now there's Krokodil Korrosion. According to a frightening report from Keith Veronese at io9, "Krokodil: Russia’s Designer Drug That Will Eat Your Flesh", some clever Russkies have developed a new designer drug that has horrific side-effects.

It sounds like a direct-to-Netflix horror movie plot — a cheap, addictive drug available in a foreign land, that turns the user's skin a scaly green color. Soon it rots the flesh, causing the user's skin to emulate that of a crocodile, leaving bone and muscle tissue exposed to the world. But the Russian drug known as krokodil is real.

• • •

Just as crack is the broke addict's cocaine, krokodil is a substitute for a much more expensive drug, heroin. The chemical behind krokodil, desomorphine, was available as a morphine substitute shortly after laboratory synthesis in 1932. Desomorphine is 8-10 times more potent than morphine. The medicinal use of desomorphine was concentrated to Europe, particularly Switzerland. The synthetic opiate has a structure nearly identical to heroin.





1 comment:

Niles said...

zombie apocalypse r us.