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Getbig Main Boards => Gossip & Opinions => Topic started by: bradistani on July 19, 2011, 04:33:48 PM
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fucking junkies and the shit they'll take ::) ::) ::)
Krokodil: The drug that eats junkies
A home-made heroin substitute is having a horrific effect on thousands of Russia's drug addicts
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.
Related articles
More Health Articles
Search the news archive for more stories
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."
Some of the names in this story have been changed
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/krokodil-the-drug-that-eats-junkies-2300787.html
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fuck man hard drugs like heroin and crack are such a huge problem now this. it amazes me that the amount of people i know that i hung around that i smoked weed with now nearly all of them shoot up drugs and are hooked on crack and heroin, weed is nothing too them. it amazes me how many are hooked and its there life just everyday people. alot of them hiding grotesque sores and such too. i just wanna pray for these people its all i can do. you can cuss out a crack addict or give them positive motivation but that shit never ever helps, its like god/satan whatever wants it that way and wants you to see in hindsight the decay
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these drugs are really hittin the new youth hard the 20 year olds doing nothing with there lives or quitting work life taking up drugs instead fulltime
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Is it the drug itself that causes the necrosis and gunk or is it because they are cooking the stuff in a non-sterile environment they are really just injecting a load of dirt and infectious material into their bloodstream which causes this flesh rot?
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Is it the drug itself that causes the necrosis and gunk or is it because they are cooking the stuff in a non-sterile environment they are really just injecting a load of dirt and infectious material into their bloodstream which causes this flesh rot?
most likely its impure manufacturing/unsterile injections causing all the unwanted side effects.
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fuck man hard drugs like heroin and crack are such a huge problem now this. it amazes me that the amount of people i know that i hung around that i smoked weed with now nearly all of them shoot up drugs and are hooked on crack and heroin, weed is nothing too them. it amazes me how many are hooked and its there life just everyday people. alot of them hiding grotesque sores and such too. i just wanna pray for these people its all i can do. you can cuss out a crack addict or give them positive motivation but that shit never ever helps, its like god/satan whatever wants it that way and wants you to see in hindsight the decay
Hillbillies love drugs.
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Is it the drug itself that causes the necrosis and gunk or is it because they are cooking the stuff in a non-sterile environment they are really just injecting a load of dirt and infectious material into their bloodstream which causes this flesh rot?
yes, this should be clarified before we continue using it
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This is fantastic, I'm for anything that causes good looking young women to make poor life decisions.
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I watched the clip to the end. The important question is this: the chick, would you hit it?
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fuck man hard drugs like heroin and crack are such a huge problem now this. it amazes me that the amount of people i know that i hung around that i smoked weed with now nearly all of them shoot up drugs and are hooked on crack and heroin, weed is nothing too them. it amazes me how many are hooked and its there life just everyday people. alot of them hiding grotesque sores and such too. i just wanna pray for these people its all i can do. you can cuss out a crack addict or give them positive motivation but that shit never ever helps, its like god/satan whatever wants it that way and wants you to see in hindsight the decay
This coming from a former meth addict
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I watched the clip to the end. The important question is this: the chick, would you hit it?
at 4.47 ? the girl with the exposed arm bone? er, no.. haha
christ, that video is fucking brutal
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at 4.47 ? the girl with the exposed arm bone? er, no.. haha
christ, that video is fucking brutal
Yea, the arm bone was not so hot but the pussy was surprisingly tidy for a degenerate, disease-ridden drug addict.
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Yea, the arm bone was not so hot but the pussy was surprisingly tidy for a degenerate, disease-ridden drug addict.
she was rotting on her inner thigh, lol.. did you miss that?
its hard to feel sympathy for junkies. but fucking hell.. the stuff in the vid is absolutely awful..
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This made me ill before it even got to the girl with the arm, what the fuck man, what is wrong with Russians
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who cares? Not me :D kunts should be shot, one step away from being a real life zombie
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have you guys seen the ''feet'' at the very end? this is terrible.. what kind of life these people had to be able to do this to themselves? its not about being stupid or ignorant, this is the result of last degree of depression, they are rotting alive and dont give a fuck, they keep shooting more poison...
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Taking funny shots here and there is well and good, but this isn't remotely the thread in which to do so.
To make cracks about the woman in the video is beyond deplorable. Hear her moaning in agony and pain? What humour is there in such tragedy? She is someone's daughter, friend, wife.
Yes, we all have choices, and these folks are making HORRIFIC ones, but still, these are human beings, folks. They show incredible weakness and probably deserve to be weeded out from the gene pool. However, no one who isn't some serial killer freak (etc.) deserves to die in such agony.
The video is beyond brutal.
It's hard to consider what drives a person to do this to himself/herself. Especially for someone like me, who has never been drunk, smoked a cigarette or gotten high.
I am almost speechless (even though my post might not indicate as much).
Beyond sad and tragic.
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fuck man hard drugs like heroin and crack are such a huge problem now this. it amazes me that the amount of people i know that i hung around that i smoked weed with now nearly all of them shoot up drugs and are hooked on crack and heroin, weed is nothing too them. it amazes me how many are hooked and its there life just everyday people. alot of them hiding grotesque sores and such too. i just wanna pray for these people its all i can do. you can cuss out a crack addict or give them positive motivation but that shit never ever helps, its like god/satan whatever wants it that way and wants you to see in hindsight the decay
so what happens the crack stimulates them heavily for a length of time then the heroin is the pillow to rest upon at the comedown?
what do they do whilst on crack?
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fucking junkies and the shit they'll take ::) ::) ::)
Krokodil: The drug that eats junkies
A home-made heroin substitute is having a horrific effect on thousands of Russia's drug addicts
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.
Related articles
More Health Articles
Search the news archive for more stories
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."
Some of the names in this story have been changed
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/krokodil-the-drug-that-eats-junkies-2300787.html
It all boils down to dopaminergic pathways in the nucleus accumbens area of the brain. You want to end the problem of addiction? Then you need to do either one of two things:
1. Find a drug that can safely increase the amount of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens in a sustained way that doesen't have negative health effects.
2. Eliminate dopamine genes so that drugs won't give people pleasure.
Until one of two things I mentioned is done, drugs will continue to be abused. Humans are genetically programmed to seek out things that increase levels of dopamine in the shell of the nucleus accumbens(sex, food, adventure), and the bottom line is that drugs of addiction(nicotine, opiates, amphetamines and cocaine) increase dopamine in the nucleus accumbens. It is the same reason why people crave sugar and fat and why the junk food industry is a multi-billion Dollar industry: even though we know that junk food is bad for our health and make us feel terrible a few hours after we eat it, it raises dopamine levels whilst we are eating it a lot more than eating an apple or chicken breast with brown rice, hence: we choose it even though we know it is bad for us. Both the drugs of abuse industry and the junk food industry use our dopamine pathways to make billions of Dollars and enslave us.
SUCKMYMUSCLE
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i looked this up and read up on this drug...they use gasoline, paint thinner ect. its no wonder there skin is rotting off. people are crazy. its seems like death would be better than to chose to live your life like that
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It leads to Organic Psycho Syndrome, meaning they turn into a warmed up corps..
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Taking funny shots here and there is well and good, but this isn't remotely the thread in which to do so.
To make cracks about the woman in the video is beyond deplorable. Hear her moaning in agony and pain? What humour is there in such tragedy? She is someone's daughter, friend, wife.
Yes, we all have choices, and these folks are making HORRIFIC ones, but still, these are human beings, folks. They show incredible weakness and probably deserve to be weeded out from the gene pool. However, no one who isn't some serial killer freak (etc.) deserves to die in such agony.
The video is beyond brutal.
It's hard to consider what drives a person to do this to himself/herself. Especially for someone like me, who has never been drunk, smoked a cigarette or gotten high.
I am almost speechless (even though my post might not indicate as much).
Beyond sad and tragic.
Up the arimidex and inject some test prop and tren ace immediatly, you sound like your period might start any second.
The only excuse i accept is that your on clomid at the moment.
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video made me a little nauseous, why people take it that far
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This made me ill before it even got to the girl with the arm, what the fuck man, what is wrong with Russians
LOL, what is wrong? Fkin' nothing. People use drugs all over the world.
In Ruski though hard earned tax money is not allocated to drug users so they are in bad situation as no money is coming in and that's why they have to use all kind of crap.
Plus what exploded the relatively high drug usage in Russia?
Well, IMO it was that drunk traitor who tried to ruin his own country as bad as possible 91-99... by support from none other than USA :-\
Fuk, what you think? Country went from n:o 2 spot in the world almost to lowest shit rapidly... people suddenly got no work, no welfare, no future for them or for their kids... that makes weaker individuals to give up.
Luckily change has been on from 2000 now but it's not immediate...
It's faster to ruin than build.
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so what happens the crack stimulates them heavily for a length of time then the heroin is the pillow to rest upon at the comedown?
what do they do whilst on crack?
one of the dudes i know is a goodlookin kid about 24 with sores all over his kneck and earlobes looks swolen krusty diseased like. what they do when they smoke crack is pick at things around the room being suspicious that crack crums might be in the carpet then in a paranoid mess look through the doors peephole to see if people are coming. its real sad. yeah heroin to come down
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fucking junkies and the shit they'll take ::) ::) ::)
Krokodil: The drug that eats junkies
A home-made heroin substitute is having a horrific effect on thousands of Russia's drug addicts
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.
Related articles
More Health Articles
Search the news archive for more stories
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."
Some of the names in this story have been changed
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/krokodil-the-drug-that-eats-junkies-2300787.html
Brad, i prefer when you post tits and asses
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jesus.
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They use that same video footage to warn of the dangers of injecting 'stablon' too....
They use the same video footage to show the 'danger' of injecting krokokil, stablon, meth, heroin, etc., etc.
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Good, it takes them out quicker. No hanging around the welfare line, these fools just off themselves. It's great, survival of the fittest.
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"EVERYBODY wanna be a ROCKSTAR, But nobody wanna buy good shit to inject!"
YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAHHHH BUDDDDDDY!!!
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This is fantastic, I'm for anything that causes good looking young women to make poor life decisions.
That answers the question if you've ever been dumped by a good looking young women.
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Theyre doing it wrong...
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Taking funny shots here and there is well and good, but this isn't remotely the thread in which to do so.
To make cracks about the woman in the video is beyond deplorable. Hear her moaning in agony and pain? What humour is there in such tragedy? She is someone's daughter, friend, wife.
Yes, we all have choices, and these folks are making HORRIFIC ones, but still, these are human beings, folks. They show incredible weakness and probably deserve to be weeded out from the gene pool. However, no one who isn't some serial killer freak (etc.) deserves to die in such agony.
The video is beyond brutal.
It's hard to consider what drives a person to do this to himself/herself. Especially for someone like me, who has never been drunk, smoked a cigarette or gotten high.
I am almost speechless (even though my post might not indicate as much).
Beyond sad and tragic.
clam down sweetheart. These freaks are doing it to themselves. BTW, you sound like a hoot.
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So I am not "fun" because I haven't indulged in booze and drugs?
Perhaps I simply don't need to be out of my head to have a good time (entertain and be entertained).
I have always thought the average person who does indulge in such activities is the individual who, when sober, is the lame duck.
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That answers the question if you've ever been dumped by a good looking young women.
Who cares as long as you hit it first? On to the next
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So I am not "fun" because I haven't indulged in booze and drugs?
Perhaps I simply don't need to be out of my head to have a good time (entertain and be entertained).
I have always thought the average person who does indulge in such activities is the individual who when, sober, is the lame duck.
I don't drink or do drugs either but I love seeing people suffer
They are no good to society, like an impotent man or an obese person or a Rumanian
Many innocent ppl suffer bad, cancer and other illnesses so I think it's great when these scum suffer
I really really do
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So I am not "fun" because I haven't indulged in booze and drugs?
Perhaps I simply don't need to be out of my head to have a good time (entertain and be entertained).
I have always thought the average person who does indulge in such activities is the individual who, when sober, is the lame duck.
Nobody here wants YOU to drink or do drugs, but please STFU to cry about some losers offing themselves. You might want to quit this side and join www.imonmyperiod.com/boards
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We're not too far off from zombies.
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We're not too far off from zombies.
I volunteer if i get a shotgun. ;D ;D ;D
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its too easy to say they are doing it to themselves , course they do but some people just had a messy life to begin with, certainly growing up in these shitholls.
not all of us are brought up warmly in a safe environment with civilized people.
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its too easy to say they are doing it to themselves , course they do but some people just had a messy life to begin with, certainly growing up in these shitholls.
not all of us are brought up warmly in a safe environment with civilized people.
(http://www.brukeroptics.com/fileadmin/be_user/nmr/contacts/netherlands.gif)
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Why don't the doctors amputate her arm. Do they expect her to make a full recovery and walk around with exposed forearm bones?
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Why don't the doctors amputate her arm. Do they expect her to make a full recovery and walk around with exposed forearm bones?
x2
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reminds me of the zombies in fallout 3
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Good, more horrible things to do to yourself, let these fucking retards kill themselves off we need less people in the world everywhere
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Rotting away all over yet she still cared enough to shave her pussy
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its too easy to say they are doing it to themselves , course they do but some people just had a messy life to begin with, certainly growing up in these shitholls.
not all of us are brought up warmly in a safe environment with civilized people.
::) Wouldn't go that far, bro.
World's strongest telescope launched few days ago 8)
1000's of times stronger than American crap HAHAHHAHAHHA Superpower is back. With sum' sickening power:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/russians-launch-space-telescope/story-e6frg6so-1226097482531
Plus currently only country operating a large scale space traffic fleet, also only one capable to deliver human to ISS and back.
I can smell the global dominance is coming again ;D
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maybe the russian government doesnt believe in crocodill?
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Well, one thing you can now be sure of: blowjob prices won't get more expensive in Russia.
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this is what heroin users have to resort to for their next high.
really speaks about the high you get were you are willing to sell
your ass or inject flesh eating poison
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where can i try that stuff?? one time wouldnt hurt
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(http://www.crystalmethaddiction.me/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/crystal-zack.jpg)