I had never even heard of this stuff. It’s frightening.
ISTM that it isn’t Desomorphine that’s causing the problems, it’s the homemade version that the junkies making. If I’m reading the links properly, it’s that they’re making it quickly in their own kitchens and injecting it without purifying it at all that’s causing their flesh to rot off. That seems like an unfair slam against the original drug.
If they were injecting similar amounts of the original, pharmaceutical grade Desomorphine would they still have the same problems?
I’ve seen it mentioned a few places, and it had a prominent place in the SDMB thread Do Drugs Make You Ugly?
"Do not Google ‘Krokodil’ " is the advice I’ve seen in all of these places, and from the nauseated responses of those who did it anyway it’s pretty good advice.
From the thread I linked:
I rather suspect that the effects of this stuff would be hideous even if you completely removed the desomorphine from it.
“Ich bin Schnappi, das kleine HOLY FUCKING SHIT, GOD NO!”
Seriously, that’s disgusting and disturbing. I only looked at a couple pictures (the first one really would have been plenty), but how are these people alive? They look like really gruesome examples of zombie special effects. Only they’re real. Gah.
Eeewwwww.
[shuffles off to prepare zombie apocalypse kit]
This is one of those cases where “warning: graphic” should not be taken lightly. Those pics have lengths of exposed bone surrounded by rotting flesh. Yikes!
HOLY SHIT, the video of the girl with her arm just bones.Shudder.
It’s almost certainly not the desomorphine itself, or the drug would never have been approved for pharmaceutical use and would be only a footnote in some volume on the research and history of analgesic biochemistry. It’s almost certainly either adulterants in the drug and/or extremely poor hygeine by the drug users. There’s a reason nurses swab down any spot they’re going to inject a needle through, and there’s a reason needles are sterile, single use. It’s to avoid nightmares like this.
Considering the destruction is similar to a Stage IV bedsore or worse, I wouldn’t be surprised if any/all of the limbs shown in those pictures were amputated shortly after. There are a few who might get away with having the necrotized tissue recized, but they must have gotten early treatment. A couple of those - like the one where the left tibia and fibula are almost completely exposed, makes me wonder how the person is still alive.
Holy shit. That’s disturbing and awful, those poor people.
(I made the mistake of watching the video, and there are a lot of related videos, many of the Russian - what is it about Russian culture that seems to foster such wide-spread drug and alcohol use?)
Wow…
Why am I thinking of “pulled pork”? 
They live in Russia.
To be so addicted to heroin that if you can’t get it, you’ll shoot up this crap… :(:(
Hopelessness basically. Knowing that except maybe for becoming a criminal there’s absolutely no way to even try to make tomorrow better than today.
I get the feeling that it’s not so much having to do with being addicted to heroin as it is that you can get this at the local drug store and make it at home. Of course, I get the feeling most of those people are still buying this stuff like heroin since I really doubt they’re walking themselves anywhere. In that case, they might as well just take heroin since it’s probably cleaner. I assume it’s either more expensive or there’s a shortage.
This seems to be Russia’s crack. Easily made, cheap, very addictive, causes lots of problems.
It reminds me of some kind of trend that never really caught on but people found a way to make meth (from Sudafed) in a 2 Liter bottle. They could literally do it while they where driving. Buy the ingredients, make it, take it, and chuck the garbage out their window.
Wow that’s some nasty stuff. Had enough after a few images.
Yea, I’m a little skeptical of the ones that show large lengths of exposed bone. I’d think any infection that went on that long would have long since killed the host.
Do you think it was all just angles, lighting and makeup that did that?
Also, is it an actual infection that’s killing the skin or the drug itself killing the skin near injection points? If it is the latter it should be a lot more plausible that it would eat the skin in such a localized fashion.
Or just a fake leg. Russia seems to be a source of a lot of made-up news stories and images, for whatever reason.
Not that I doubt the actual story, that the drug exists, is being abused by heroin addicts or that it causes horrific tissue damage, I’m just wondering about the image in the OP’s link that shows almost the entire fibula/tibula exposed with almost no skin attached. I have trouble believing someone could survive that.
Well Russia and made-up news stories I won’t argue against, that’s for sure. I do understand the concern and raised eyebrow at the images, I just think it is completely possible for such a thing to happen without the person dying before it gets to that point. Do of course keep in mind the users are usually dead very quickly, so those images may be at the very final stages of the physical effects of the drug before death.