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.
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.
WARNING: Contains shocking images
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.
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.
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.”
