Drug dealers are to be "treated like serial killers" and could be sent to forced labour camps under harsh laws being drawn up by Russia's Kremlin-controlled parliament.
Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of the state duma, the lower house, said a "total war on drugs" was needed to stem a soaring abuse rate driven by the flow of Afghan heroin through central Asia to Europe.
Och följaktligen - från Independent:
The home-made drug that Oleg and Sasha inject is known as krokodil, or "crocodile". It is desomorphine, a synthetic opiate many times more powerful than heroin that is created from a complex chain of mixing and chemical reactions, which the addicts perform from memory several times a day. While heroin costs from £20 to £60 per dose, desomorphine can be "cooked" from codeine-based headache pills that cost £2 per pack, and other household ingredients available cheaply from the markets.
It is a drug for the poor, and its effects are horrific. It was given its reptilian name because its poisonous ingredients quickly turn the skin scaly. Worse follows. Oleg and Sasha have not been using for long, but Oleg has rotting sores on the back of his neck.
[...]
Heroin addiction kills 30,000 people per year in
Russia – a third of global deaths from the drug – but now there is the
added problem of krokodil. Mr Ivanov recalled a recent visit to a
drug-treatment centre in Western Siberia. "They told me that two years
ago almost all their drug users used heroin," said the drugs tsar. "Now,
more than half of them are on desomorphine."
He
estimates that overall, around 5 per cent of Russian drug users are on
krokodil and other home-made drugs, which works out at about 100,000
people. It's a huge, hidden epidemic – worse in the really isolated
parts of Russia where supplies of heroin are patchy – but palpable even
in cities such as Tver.
(Jag snubblade över artiklarna, och några bilder jag inte hade haft särskilt mycket emot att ha osedda, i försöken att hitta tidigare refererad Krokodil-serie.)
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