The Drug That Eats You From the Outside In

Photographer Emanuele Satolli spent time in Russia documenting krokodil users, and the images he came back with look less like photojournalism than evidence of something that shouldn’t be possible. Krokodil—desomorphine—is a homemade opioid cooked from codeine and a short list of industrial chemicals: paint thinner, lighter fluid, hydrochloric acid. It’s cheaper than heroin and roughly as powerful, and anyone can make it.

What it does to the body is difficult to describe without sounding like you’re exaggerating. It attacks memory and concentration. The flesh around injection sites necrotizes and falls away, exposing muscle, then bone. There were documented cases of young women losing genital tissue to it entirely. Life expectancy after first use: one to three years. TIME published footage filmed inside a Russian cookhouse—addicts preparing doses in rooms that look and presumably smell like the inside of a chemical fire—and it confirmed everything the photographs had suggested and then some.

The specific horror of krokodil, beyond the physical destruction, is the accessibility. It’s easier to make than most things people cook on weekends. The barrier between a person and the worst drug ever documented is almost nothing. And once started, what remains isn’t life in any recognizable sense—just the interval between doses, getting shorter, until it isn’t. Satolli’s photographs don’t editorialize. They don’t need to.