Drugs horror stories of the day

From The Business Insider:

Cocaine on the streets now in New York and Los Angeles is cut with a drug that's causing users skin to rot off, doctors say.

According to KTLA, physicians at Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute say drug dealers are cutting cocaine with levamisole, a chemical used by veterinarians for deworming livestock.

Levamisole damages blood vessels under the skin, causing the rotting.

A study by the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology looked at sixcocaine users who ingested the drug. On each, skin from their face, ears, nose and torso was rotting.

Several more cases have been reported since the paper was written.

The Department of Justice says up to 70 percent of cocaine in the U.S. is tainted with levamisole. The dewormer is cheap, easily available, and gives a small additional high to the cocaine.

"We believe these cases of skin reactions and illnesses linked to contaminated cocaine are just the tip of the iceberg in a looming public health problem posed by levamisole," said study author Noah Craft, MD, PhD, Los Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.

Health warnings have also been issued in Delaware, Washington, New Mexico, and Canada.

Please follow Business Insider on Twitterand Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Man Dresses Up In Bra And Panties And Stabs Neighbor's Pygmy Goat To Death After Taking "Synthetic Drugs"
• Johns Hopkins Study Finds That Controlled Magic Mushroom Use Is Safe And Has Lasting Benefits

A home-made heroin substitute is having a horrific effect on thousands of Russia's drug addicts

Independent Wednesday, 22 June 2011

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."

_____________

Related:

Barney Frank, Ron Paul to Introduce Bill Ending Marijuana Prohibition

"This Is Not A Program to Salvage the [Greek] Economy, It's a Program for Pillage Before Bankruptcy"

from Washington's Blog:

The best quote on the Greek parliament's vote of confidence for Prime Minister George Papandreou - and thus his austerity plan:

"This is not a program to salvage the economy, it's a program for pillage before bankruptcy," said Alexis Tsipras, head of the small opposition Left Coalition.

It's not just Greece.

As PhD economist Michael Hudson said in 2009:

• The giant financial institutions have already killed their host - the real American economy

• Since they realize that the American economy is dead, they are trying to suck as much blood out of America as possible while the corpse is still warm

• Because the American economy is dead, their plan is to soon jump to another host. They will ship all of their money overseas

For background, see this, this, this and this.

__________-

Related:

Greek government survives vote

Greek PM wins battle but still likely to lose the war

Pimco warns Greece will default

Euro ministers delay Greek loan decision until July

Greek savers rush for gold

EU urged to block Greece bail-out

Euro to go up in smoke by 2015

Debtocracy: The Movie

Playing with Debt Nukes

Open Letter to the Irish Government and Legal Establishment: 14 Simple Questions Which Need to be Addressed!

from Sovereign Independent: 

By James O’Neill – Contributing Writer -


This letter is for both government representatives of Ireland and those in the legal system who have been in trusted to uphold the interests and the rights of the Irish people and their assets.
It has become quite obvious over the last few years that people in certain positions have abused their power for their own greed or for the agenda of a certain elite group.
The Irish people were fooled into a false boom created intentionally to put these hard working people into an un-payable debt.  The next stage of this crime is to suppress the people financially and take their assets and the countries natural resources as payment.  This particular trick has been played in many naturally rich and under developed countries for years; many African countries come to mind.
These so called elite bankers and multinational corporations who have taken our wealth and destroyed or culture will flee this country when their plans fail, as the masses realize to the full extent that this was planned and plotted behind their backs while they were kept busy watching propaganda news and pointless soaps. However, for those of you puppets who are left behind, you will have an angry mob to answer to.
When this day comes,  and make no mistake it is coming, those who have knowingly taken part in this scheme, regardless of who assigned you, will be judged by the true law – the law of the people,  and you will not be protected by any other corrupted legal systems.
For those involved and who wish to walk away, it is too late. The only way you can now save yourself and your soul is by exposing those involved and by stopping this evil in its tracks before it is too late.
For those who are in positions of power and are truly ignorant to what is really going on, here is a guideline of some questions that need to be investigated and answered.
1. Who owns the banks and what backs the money they print or computerize?  (The creation of paper money was originally backed by gold. Any currency without backing will fail, history tells us this)
2. Why don’t the Irish print their own interest free money backed with the vast amount of oil and gas they have found off the coasts of Ireland? Who now controls this resource and why?
3. Why are all our fishing towns and villages closed down while foreign fleets come in and take their fill?
4. Why hss top quality Irish agricultural land been left idle when 2/3rds of the world is in hunger?
5. Why is our forestry being put up for auction to the highest bidder, without the knowledge of the Irish people?
6. Who controls the mainstream media (Every newspaper, radio and TV news broadcasts cover the same three or four topics every day- the only difference is the wording. If there was truly investigative journalism out there, then it could not be possible that they would all be covering the same topics day in day out)
7. Why is the main ingredient of rat poison, Fluoride, being pumped into our water supply?
8. Why are they spraying toxic chemicals into the air (Chemtrails) but at the same time getting ready to charge us more carbon tax?
9. Where does this carbon tax money go?
10. Where is the evidence that Co2 is causing climate change? We were all taught at school that trees and plants live off Co2 and transform it back into oxygen and without it they and we would die? Can we not plant more trees to combat this problem?  Why is there no publicity about the vast amount of forestry being cut down everyday around the world?
11. Why are natural foods and products being demonized by the corporate world and why are GM products not being labeled on certain foods we buy in supermarkets?
12. Why are natural health herbs, minerals and vitamins, which have been used for thousands of years being outlawed or the cost of licenses to sell these products made so high that people cannot possibly produce them?
13. Why are we being taxed more now than at any time throughout our history and where is this money going?  (I will help you answer that question; the majority of it goes to pay off the interest  of money the government has borrowed from private banks, which if you follow the path far enough you will find the Queen of England).
14. Why are we not being told the truth about the so called “famine” in Ireland and how there were hundreds of ship loads of food taken out of this country, under armed soldiers, while millions starved and millions more had to flee the country never again to see their families?
There is no doubt that there is a lot of evil in the world but as you know good always prevails. 
Time to choose!