WARNING: Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to Google Image search any of the terms you see here. You will be screaming, crying and sucking your thumb while huddled in the fetal position for at least a week, and you will wish you could perform that memory erasing charm from Harry Potter on yourself. It is bad enough that this has to be reported, but we are not going to be saddled with the guilt of destroying millions of mental states because the Internet is an awful place that MUST have pictures of soul-torturing things.

Seriously. Do not do it. Now to the news.

As Pussy Riot and the LGBT community have already proven, Russia is not exactly the dream place to retire. You could spend your remaining years after a long career as a professional deer puncher. Now a recent development has travel agencies and high school history teachers everywhere buying Post-it notes the size of kites, writing “Nope!” on it, and slapping it over Russia on their big maps of the world. This development has one name: Krokodil.

Krokodil, Russian for “crocodile,” is a do-it-yourself drug made from codeine pills, which most sane people would take for seriously bad headaches. But some enterprising yet broke Russian junkie somehow discovered that if you take these pills, rig up a “Breaking Bad” style set up involving various chemicals, and do some chemistry, you have got yourself a cheap alternative to heroin.

Considering that Russia has the most heroin addicts in the known universe, this guy must be some kind of hero. And he probably was—until things suddenly degenerated into a Lovecraftian nightmare.

Krokodil’s cheapness comes with a horrific price: it turns addicts into the closest things there are to the walking dead. Reports have shown early symptoms like rotting sores, abscesses and gray scaly flesh, the latter of which gave the drug its name. And those are the mild symptoms, because people who use krokodil too long are not likely to live out the year. But before death gets off his lazy ass to bless them with sweet release, they will have to watch their limbs painfully decompose and then fall off, not to mention getting a good look at what their bones actually look like.

It is so bad that I had to clench every muscle in my body just to type this, and that is without even seeing any pictures or video of these effects. Again, do not Google it.

How do you feel now? Now that you know that not only does a drug like this exist, but there are people in the world plagued by indescribable agony right at this moment because of it? Well, the krokodil train to hell has another stop right here in the U.S. Two confirmed uses of krokodil recently surfaced in Arizona and several in Chicago, to the terror of doctors and citizens alike. It is like the drug is self aware, and it has come to seek us out and eat us from within before dragging us into the abyss.

How can we possibly fight this? Well, first, do not do like the Russian leadership has done in response: a whole lot of jack. The Russian government has publicly decried the drug’s use and called for sites giving recipes to be shut down. But the problem is that codeine pills are not only cheap and available in Russia, they are so over the counter it is ridiculous. That is not the case here, since getting anything with huge amounts of codeine requires a prescription (despite what some rappers might say.) Personally, I say seize all the krokodil on earth, put it into a rocket and shoot it into the sun, but it will take Putin explaining how krokodil makes him sad while he is shirtless before anybody there does anything.

Also, this does beg the obvious question: Can an addict be successfully rehabilitated? Yes, but the recovery is just as agonizing as the effects.

Detoxing from krokodil takes about a month, and the addict is in so much pain the entire time they have to be constantly injected with the kind of tranquilizers that would give Keith Moon pause.

So, what is the best solution? Do not take heroin. Or if you must, at least have enough cash to get the good stuff, so as to not die in agony.

Alright, that was seriously heavy and depressing. Here is a video of a dog singing to a crying baby, and as a chaser, Daft Punk by Mario Paint.

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