Three people are known to have taken the flesh-rotting drug here, but those cases may just be the tip of the iceberg, Dr. Abhin Singla said.
Dr. Abhin Singla was walking through the intensive care unit of Presence St. Joseph Medical Center Monday when he overheard a nurse speaking about heroin and then caught the distinctive odor of rotting flesh.
And he knew: Krokodil had arrived in Joliet.
The homemade drug that combines codeine with such things as gasoline and lighter fluid, producing a high three times stronger than heroin when injected, is called the flesh-eating drug because it rots the body from the inside out. It has claimed thousands of victims in Russia, but has only been publicly reported in the United States since last week.
Within 24 hours of seeing his first krokodil case, two more emerged, said Singla, St. Joseph's director of addiction services and medical director for The Promises of Recovery, a treatment facility. It's likely there will be many more before word gets out to the heroin-using community, he said.
"Honestly, I'm kind of surprised -- it was just in Arizona and Nevada last week -- how quickly it got here," Singla said.
Then again, maybe it shouldn't be a huge shock given that Joliet is often a stopping-off place for drug dealers moving their wares along Interstate 55 and 80 from the West Coast to Chicago, said Singla, who used to work with the Will County state's attorney's office on drug cases.
The three patients he's currently treating have three things in common: They're female, they're between the ages of 18 and 25, and they come from middle-class backgrounds in the suburban Joliet area.
One knew she was taking krokodil, the other two did not, Singla said.
What they now also have in common are months of withdrawal, surgery and drug treatment ahead of them, and the hope that the ravages of the drug doesn't ultimately take their lives, he said.
"If you want to kill yourself, this is the way to do it," Singla said.
The genesis of the drug actually goes back to the 1930s, when it was known as a painkiller called "desomorphine," he said. While no longer used here for that purpose, it is in Russia and other countries. In tablet form, it doesn't cause the abscesses and gangrene that result when it's injected, Singla said.
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