Krokodil Crock: How Rumors Of A ‘Flesh-Eating Zombie Drug’ Swept The Nation

~ Jason Schwartz

This is why you don’t see sensational horror stories about new drugs on this blog:

By now you probably have heard that krokodil, a nasty homemade version of the narcotic painkiller desomorphine, is starting to catch on in the United States. Having eaten its way through the flesh of myriad Russian opiate addicts, the caustic concoction—notorious for the ghastly side effects caused by its corrosive contaminants, including abscesses and gangrene—is reportedly burning its way through Arizona, Texas, Nevada, Utah, Oklahoma, Colorado, Illinois, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. “The monster has crossed the ocean,” Time declared last month.

Like most monster stories, this tale of what CNN calls a “flesh-eating zombie drug” stalking the land does not appear to be true, as some reporters have begun to recognize. Yet others continue to hype an American krokodil craze that seems to exist only in the fevered imaginations of anti-drug propagandists and their journalistic accomplices. Just last week the Associated Press claimed doctors had confirmed that a Texas teenager’s skin lesions were caused by krokodil, and on Tuesday police in Lamar, Colorado,told reporters the drug had shown up there.

“A lot of people want to call it a trend, but we’re not seeing it,” says Joseph Moses, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

via Krokodil Crock: How Rumors Of A ‘Flesh-Eating Zombie Drug’ Swept The Nation – Forbes.

Published by Jason Schwartz

I have been an addiction professional and social worker since 1994. I started blogging in 2005 as the Clinical Director at Dawn Farm. I no longer work at Dawn Farm and am now the Director of Behavioral Medicine at a community hospital, and a lecturer at Eastern Michigan University’s School of Social Work. Views expressed here are my own. Keep in mind that the field, the contexts in which the field operates, and my views have changed over time.