In provincial Russia, a home-cooked opioid called krokodil has spread through towns where heroin is too expensive and pharmacies sell the ingredients over the counter. The film follows users who describe cooking desomorphine from codeine tablets mixed with paint thinner, iodine, and gasoline, a process that takes under an hour and produces a high lasting a fraction of heroin's. Cameras go inside cramped apartments and makeshift shooting galleries where addicts, some barely out of their teens, inject the corrosive drug directly into scarred and rotting flesh, a side effect that gives krokodil its name. Doctors and addiction workers explain why users keep returning to a substance that visibly destroys their bodies within months, and family members describe watching relatives deteriorate with no rehabilitation system equipped to help them. The film does not moralize so much as document, letting the wounds, the makeshift kitchens, and the users' own accounts make the case that this may be the world's most physically destructive street drug currently in circulation.