New Designer Drug: Krokodil (crocodile) – A Morphine Derivative

There’s a new designer drug out there, called “Krokodil”, which is a derivative of morphine, that can turn an addict’s skin greenish, scaly and cause it to rot away, which has the DEA on alert.

“We’re looking at it overseas, but we have not seen it yet in the U.S.,” DEA spokesman Rusty Payne told FoxNews.com. “But we would not be surprised when that day comes.” Fox News

So far the users of this drug have only been found in large numbers in Russia, where 65 million doses of the opiate have been seized during the first three months of this year alone, Russia’s Federal Drug Control Service told Time. To make this deadly drug, which has a comparable effect to heroin but is much cheaper to make, users mix codeine with gasoline, paint thinner, iodine, hydrochloric acid and red phosphorous.

Codeine, which is a controlled substance in the US is widely available in Russia. Up to one million people in 2010, were injecting the resulting substance into their veins in Russia, thus far the only country worldwide to see it grow into an epidemic. The drug, also known as crocodile, refers to the greenish and scaly appearance of a user’s skin at the site of injection as blood vessels rupture and cause surrounding tissues to die.

The drug first appeared in Siberia and parts of Russia around 2002, but has spread throughout the country in recent years. Until Fox News contacted them, the Washington-based National Institute on Drug Abuse , said they had never heard of the drug.

Dr. Ellen Marmur, chief of dermatological and cosmetic surgery at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, told FoxNews.com she had never seen any cases involving krokodil, but said it reminded her of “skin popping,” or when intravenous drug users inject a substance directly into their skin due to damaged veins.

“This looks to me a lot like skin popping, what drug users used to do back in the day with heroin and other drugs,” Marmur said. “It just kills the skin, that’s what you’re seeing, big dead pieces of skin.” Those large pieces of dead skin are referred to as eschars, Marmur said, leaving the user prone to infection, amputation and other complications.

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But a medical toxicologist at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York, Dr. Lewis Nelson said, he doubts krokodil will reach the United States due to the availability of other cheap, powerful drugs such as black tar heroin and Oxycontin.