Drugs are bad, mmmkay?
Apparently, that memo is still lost on a lot of people. Authorities in Mexico reported that a 17-year-old girl in Puerta Vallarta had lacerations on her genitals that she said were caused by her addiction to Krokodil.
Via Huffington Post:
“The young woman who used this drug had an infection that had rotted her genitals. It wasn’t sexually transmitted. She said she’d been using krokodil for the last two months,” Hernandez said, according to a Huffington Post translation of Mexican newspaper El Periodico Correo.
The woman told authorities that the drug was readily available on street corners. Hernandez added that the drug has also been reported in Mexico City.
Krokodil is a street drug with effects similar to heroin that is made by cooking crushed codeine pills with household chemicals. It is significantly cheaper than heroin, and reportedly ten times as potent. However, the impurities in the drug damage vascular tissue, which causes the flesh to rot.
Reports of Krokodil have been spreading rapidly since September but authorities still haven’t confirmed that the drug has officially surfaced in the United States (*side eye). Skeptcis maintain that instances of intravenous drug users with sores and rotting flesh could have been caused by other infections. Krokodil was first reported in Russia and the pandemic there peaked in 2011.