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Germany

Concocted In Russia, New Designer Drug “Krokodil” Has A Deadly Bite

Officials believe the drug, which is a mix that includes codeine and paint thinner, has arrived in Germany. Sold as a heroin substitute, "Krokodil" users only realize much later that they have consumed a substance that results in extreme

Concocted In Russia, New Designer Drug “Krokodil” Has A Deadly Bite

Worldcrunch *NEWSBITES

Codeine, benzine, paint thinner, hydrochloric acid and red phosphorus – that's what goes into "Krokodil," a drug that originated in Russia and is believed to have now hit Western Europe. In Germany, workers in drug cafés have reported seeing "disastrous skin conditions and damage to soft tissue" among Krokodil users.

Police in Frankfurt and Bochum have so far been unable to confirm the presence of the drug, but experts say that the physical reactions observed in certain addicts indicate that they are caused by the drug.

Many users don't know what is in the drug, the effects of which make crystal meth look benign by comparison. In Russia, cough medicine and headache medication containing codeine can be bought without a prescription, allowing addicts to mix the drug cocktail themselves.

The name crocodile is believed to be derived from the infections around the injection areas where the skin turns green and dies. The scaly green condition spreads to the rest of the body and the toxic drug also effects bone tissue, eating away at users from the inside. Amputations are sometimes necessary, but users usually don't live for more than two to three years after starting to use this highly addictive drug.

Use of the drug is growing in Russia because it is cheap: one dose costs about 5 euros (as opposed to 50 euros for heroin), but the resulting euphoria is similar to that experienced by heroin users. Many heroin addicts who can no longer afford that drug switch over to "Krokodil," even though the effects last for less than two hours.

Experts believe that since codeine is not available without a prescription in German pharmacies, the drug is made in Russia, transported along the usual drug routes – Warsaw, Berlin, Hanover – to the rest of Germany, and sold as heroin to users.

Since the immediate effects of "Krokodil" are similar to those of heroin, users may have to use it for two or three weeks before becoming aware of the dangerous side-effects and thus realzing that what they were sold was something other than heroin.

Read the full original article in German by Julia Gleixner

Photo - CrashTestAddict

*Newsbites are digest items, not direct translations

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Ideas

Shame On The García Márquez Heirs — Cashing In On The "Scraps" Of A Legend

A decision to publish a sketchy manuscript as a posthumous novel by the late Gabriel García Márquez would have horrified Colombia's Nobel laureate, given his painstaking devotion to the precision of the written word.

Photo of a window with a sticker of the face of Gabriel Garcia Marquez with butterfly notes at Guadalajara's International Book Fair.

Poster of Gabriel Garcia Marquez at Guadalajara's International Book Fair.

Juan David Torres Duarte

-Essay-

BOGOTÁ — When a writer dies, there are several ways of administering the literary estate, depending on the ambitions of the heirs. One is to exercise a millimetric check on any use or edition of the author's works, in the manner of James Joyce's nephew, Stephen, who inherited his literary rights. He refused to let even academic papers quote from Joyce's landmark novel, Ulysses.

Or, you continue to publish the works, making small additions to their corpus, as with Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett and Clarice Lispector, or none at all, which will probably happen with Milan Kundera and Cormac McCarthy.

Another way is to seek out every scrap of paper the author left and every little word that was jotted down — on a piece of cloth, say — and drip-feed them to publishers every two to three years with great pomp and publicity, to revive the writer's renown.

This has happened with the Argentine Julio Cortázar (who seems to have sold more books dead than alive), the French author Albert Camus (now with 200 volumes of personal and unfinished works) and with the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. The latter's posthumous oeuvre is so abundant I am starting to wonder if his heirs haven't hired a ghost writer — typing and smoking away in some bedsit in Barcelona — to churn out "newly discovered" works.

Which group, I wonder, will our late, great novelist Gabriel García Márquez fit into?

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