Krokodil Tears

About a decade ago, Russian doctors began to notice strange wounds on the bodies of some drug addicts — patches of flesh turning dark and scaly, like a crocodile's — in the hospitals of Siberia and the Russian Far East. It didn't take them long to discover the cause: the patients had begun injecting a new drug they called, predictably, krokodil. (Some accounts suggest the name was derived from one of the drug's precursor chemicals, alpha-chlorocodide.) Videos showing the effects of the "flesh-eating" drug — christened desomorphine when it was invented for medical use in 1932 — quickly went...

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