Krokodil, The World's Most Dangerous Drug

Imagine a drug you have to cook on the stove for half an hour and then shoot into a vein to get a high that lasts for 90 minutes. That's about seven hours less than the high one gets from shooting heroin.

Then having withdrawal symptoms from the drug just 30 minutes later, along with your skin turning black or green and leathery and peeling off. Your fingertips breaking off. Your toes rotting. Veins turning black and arms being amputated. There aren't many addicts to this drug because they don't live very long.

This is the drug known as krokodil (pronounced either crocodile or krok-o-DEEL), named after the effect it has on human skin, and, coincidentally, a weekly magazine of political cartoons and bad jokes published by the Communist party in the old Soviet Union. 

What Exactly Is Krokodil?

Krokodil is codeine on steroids. Codeine-containing cough syrup is mixed with chemicals (we are not going to tell you which) on the stove to turn it into a particularly fast-acting analog of morphine, the painkiller you might get in an IV drip in the hospital called desomorphine, or, more accurately, dihydrodesoxymorphine. Under laboratory conditions with a purification process, the end product of these chemical reactions is used to make the highly regulated prescription drug Permonid.

But when people cook cough syrup on the stove, they don't do a purification process. Since one of the ingredients in the mix is a substance called red phosphorus, which catches on fire at room temperature if you don't pour it out of its vial into the mix just so, gee, maybe people would think there is something potentially dangerous about making this drug at home. But there is only a short list of ingredients and a relatively simple chemical process to make a crude, unrefined, toxic, and deadly form of the drug that can be shot into a vein.

Where Did Krokodil Come From?

It appears that the recipe for krokodil originated at a military base in Siberia about 10 years ago. There are about 100,000 users in Russia and 20,000 in Ukraine. Use of the drug has spread through Russian-speaking communities elsewhere in Europe, and to Poland. 

More Questions And Answers About Krokodil

Why do people use krokodil?

Krokodil makes people feel happy, and it makes them feel happy very fast. No matter what is going on around you, or whether your skin is turning a leathery green and peeling off, for about an hour and a half you feel that everything is right with the world. 

The effect lasts about 90 minutes. Then you have about 30 minutes to cook up another batch and shoot it into a vein before you experience an awful crash. Your bowels will move. Your sense of pain will be heightened. You may want to throw up. These symptoms may not be as intense as they are when coming off heroin, although they come around a lot faster. But you can avoid this if you take another shot of the drug.

Is the drug really that bad?

It's not just the psychoactive part of the drug that is the extreme problem with krokodil. It's the impurities. In addition to potentially blowing up on the stove or on the shelf, they can also blow up inside veins. Injecting the drug ruins veins fast, the drug is addictive, and people run out of places to inject it.

If the drug is that bad, why do people use it?

The attraction of krokodil is that it gives a high like heroin without the heroin, which isn't available everywhere. The ingredients for making it are not hard to find and don't cost a lot of money. The process for making a version of the drug that will get you high -- and kill you -- isn't very complicated. If you can read, you can make krokodil. The ingredients are somewhat less explosive than those used to cook meth, although they are more likely to catch on fire.

It's just the processing chemicals that are the problem, then?

Putting red phosphorus into your veins isn't a good plan. However, the process of cooking krokodil on the stove introduces other impurities into the mix, including some byproducts of codeine that have unpredictable effects. Also, the cough medicines used to get the codeine can contain compounds like Diphenhydramine, the active ingredient in Benadryl. This changes the "high" to just getting sleepy and then feeling a crash but not having energy to make more of the drug. Even worse, the over the counter medication used to get the codeine also often contains caffeine, so the user feels agitated, nervous, jumpy, sleepy, nauseous, and sad all at the same time when the drug wears off.

Is this drug illegal in the USA and Canada?

Absolutely. Did you have to ask?

If someone I know is using krokodil, what can I do?

Get them into treatment fast. It is possible to beat the addiction, but it won't be easy.