Snap Goes the Crocodile

Marina Akhmedova in Eurozine:

On 28 July, "Crocodile", my reportage on life inside a drug den in provincial Russia, was published in the Russian magazine, Russky reporter. Three days later, Roskomdadzor, the Russian media regulator issued an official warning against the publisher for so-called promotion of narcotics, and demanded that my article be pulled from the magazine's website. The warning mentioned the fact that the piece contained information about how to prepare "crocodile", i.e. desomorphine, a hard drug produced using everyday medicines and now increasingly popular within Russia.

All I can say is the following: if these same officials had undertaken some basic research, they would understand that preparing "crocodile" is, in fact, a very complicated process, and one that cannot be mastered from a few short sentences. Even after long periods of addiction, not every drug user is able to prepare it (indeed, those who can't are expected to buy all the ingredients and share the dose out among those present in the kitchen). I included such details in my article only as background in an attempt to create an atmosphere faithful to what I saw.