Thursday, September 26, 2013

Meaning of the word "insane".

Insane is a word that gets bandied about a lot these days. You hear it in casual conversation all the time. To the point where its kind of losing its punch.

Example, when I say "drug users are insane" you all said "Duh, obviously!" But lets take a look at the latest drug craze peaking in Russia and just starting in the USA. It will give you a little window into what the word "insane" means.

Krokodil, a flesh-eating drug which first surfaced in Russia more than a decade ago, has reportedly been found in the United States.
Similar to morphine or heroin, krokodil is made by mixing codeine with substances like gasoline, paint thinner, oil or alcohol. That mixture is then injected into a vein, potentially causing an addict's skin to greenish, scaly and eventually rot away.  Dr. Frank LoVecchio, co-medical director at Banner Good Samaritan Poison and Drug Information Center in Arizona, told CBS5 that the first two cases of people using the drug have been reported in the state. He declined to comment on the patients' conditions.

They're not talking about the kind of scaly you get from a sunburn, or a case of athlete's foot here. They're talking gangrenous diabetic ulcer, where the whole area around the injection site -dies-, leaving a freakin' crater half an inch deep or more and a couple inches across. The more they shoot this crap up the more tissue they kill, until they have to have their entire limb amputated. Its like something out of Dante's Inferno. On the bright side, it normally kills them before they lose more than one limb to the ulcers.

In 2010, up to a million people, according to various estimates, were injecting the resulting substance into their veins in Russia, thus far the only country worldwide to see it grow into an epidemic, Time reports.
The drug's sinister moniker — also known as crocodile — refers to the greenish and scaly appearance of a user's skin at the site of injection as blood vessels rupture and cause surrounding tissues to die. According to reports, the drug first appeared in Siberia and parts of Russia around 2002, but has spread throughout the country in recent years.

A -million- people shooting this gunk. A million junkies, my friends. That's like the whole city of Hamilton, twice. They all know they're going to get a huge, bleeding, stinking (and I do mean stinking, gangrene smells like rotting bacon) purulent ulcer, AND a fever, AND the runs, AND the pukes, every single time they shoot up. But they do it anyway. They do it, and they keep doing it until their very limbs drop off and then they die. Horribly.

That's what the word "insane" means. Class dismissed.

The Phantom

2 comments:

Alyric said...

There are no words. Except this.

In olden days, leprosy was something to be feared and avoided.

Now, apparently, giving yourself leprosy (or at least, symptoms very similar to it) is hunky-dory if you can get high in the process.

To steal one of Kate's headlines at Small Dead Animals: We need a famine.

The Phantom said...

Hey Alyric. Leprosy is a mild cold and famine a minor inconvenience compared to this.

Yesterday I saw some pictures of the damage done by this krocodil shit. I'm not going to post them because they look like they came out of a wound care textbook and really, they're fucking terrifying. Woman with six inches of exposed radius bone showing in her arm, ok? Get my drift? People can google it if they want an eyefull of nightmare, I'm not about to post it.

Put the madness in perspective here, six inches of exposed arm bone or amputated foot for a 90 minute high. Oh, plus the come-down includes lots of medical terminology like "rigors", "extreme pain", "extensive brain damage" and other fun symptoms.

A million people in Russia on this. Now starting in the USA. Real actual zombies, with actual flesh rotting off. Puts the zombie defense strategy joke in a whole new light eh?