Time Magazine and Photojournalist Emanuele Satolli Take You Inside a Russian 'Krokodil' Cook House

If you haven't heard yet, A) pay more attention to the news B) krokodil is a fringe drug making headlines around the world for its ability to turn the injection site of those unfortunate enough to use it into a decaying waste land. Seriously. It's somewhere around a 1/10th the price of heroin, but gives you a similar high. According to Time,

But addicts pay dearly for krokodil’s cheap high. Wherever on the body a user injects the drug, blood vessels burst and surrounding tissue dies, sometimes falling off the bone in chunks. That side effect has earned krokodil its other nickname: the zombie drug. The typical life span of an addict is just two or three years.

This is because krokodil, names such because of the reptilian marks it leaves on those who use it, is a mixture of items you'd never want to ingest. Also according to Time,

[A]n addict can cook up krokodil using ingredients and tools bought from the local pharmacy and hardware store. The active ingredient, codeine, is a mild opiate sold over the counter in many countries. Users mix codeine with a brew of poisons such as paint thinner, hydrochloric acid and red phosphorus scraped from the strike pads on matchboxes.

In October, CNN published a report suggesting the drug had finally made its way stateside after proliferating under the radar in Russia in the mid 2000s, although DEA officials would need to catch someone in the act of making a batch of krokodil before they would be able to confirm that the drug is in fact in the US.

To see the effects of krokodil in action, head over to Google images. But be warned: it's incredibly graphic. If you want more info on krokodil, head over to the Wiki page for desomorphine (krokodil is the drug's street name).