Exuberant decay appears to be all the rage in the current zeitgeist. Of all of our current calamities, including the federal government shutdown, the failure of the war on drugs , the NSA spying on citizens, and the ending of Breaking Bad among other things has helped to collectively birth the start of something awful in the United States. The proverbial awfulness is the appearance of Krokodil on American soil. For those who haven’t heard, Krokodil is a cheap heroin substitute that literally “eats” the flesh of those who subject themselves to it, turning it green and scaly at the injection site. It’s a lethal concoction of various codeine-based painkillers, iodine, lighter fluid or gasoline, and industrial cleaning oil. Yes, people on the streets of Russia have actually been injecting these fluids into their bloodstream.  Now, this drug has surfaced on the streets of Arizona.

What is truly baffling about Krokodil is how far people will drudge in depravity for any means of escapism. Footage and images of the users are truly disturbing. In clinics that have treated the drug, doctors there have said it has the most potent probability of addiction and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. Arguments are still abounding for the legalization and regulation of many drugs, but there isn’t a solitary purpose for the existence of this one. Besides eating away at your body, it will leave you with massive sores, poisoned blood, gangrene, and brain damage among other things. This isn’t Cold War-era propaganda, it’s the morbid truth and sometimes the truth is more petrifying than fiction. These aren’t matters that can be simply brushed aside, as those who become full-fledged Krokodil addicts are often only given a year to live.

Trying to articulate a formative effort against not only Krokodil but to help the users of it is something that needs to be well-planned and happen very soon. Regulation for this drug would be absolute insanity and anyone who would support such a stance would have nothing to stand on. The drug is purely entropic and this hyper-addiction is very cheap. Combatting it may prove difficult as it has supposedly existed in in Russia since 2003 and the only treatment for the grotesque wounds would be massive skin grafts and enduring surgeries, if the user survives long enough to receive treatment.

Unsurprisingly, what informed mainstream culture of the existence of Krokodil was a slew of viral videos that at first seemed like something of an indie horror flick. Then, VICE ended up running a piece on the subject and they confronted the myths that turned out to be more terrifying that they thought. Now there’s a real chance of this drug becoming an epidemic, and there are numerous pandering debates over whether it was nature versus nurture or the great and powerful media that caused this.  No, there will not be an outbreak of rampant deformed, drug-addled citizens. There will not be a de facto zombie apocalypse, the intent of this is article is to inform and not strike panic. Well, that’s not entirely true, maybe if people would panic progressively, we could focus more on a solution.