How Greater Freedom for Mother Russia Turned into a Death Sentence for Hundreds of Thousands of Russians

Certainly the destruction of the Iron Curtain and the opening of trade and cultural exchanges with other countries brought many benefits to the Russian people. At the same time, this shift provided new turf for international crime and drug trafficking organizations that saw an untapped market for their wares.

Economic and civil chaos followed the conversion of the U.S.S.R. to its separate components. Law enforcement bodies were poorly organized and managed. And satellite countries suddenly lost funding, staffing and management influences from the former state government. Good or bad, these influences did lend a certain amount of stability to such activities as border and customs policing.

In this less-regulated environment, drug traffickers established new trade routes from the poppy fields in Afghanistan to the rich consumer markets in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and other cities.

Chemicals Flow In, Drugs Flow Out of Afghanistan

Internationally, the chemicals needed to turn poppy resin into heroin flow toward Afghanistan. There are hundreds of refining labs situated along the Tajikistan border, converting that resin into a salable product. Both opium and heroin cross from Afghanistan into Tajikistan and from there are conveyed into Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan shares a long, utterly porous border with Russia. In some regions, the border is just a dirt road through bare mountains, with nothing more than a wooden rail barring the way. A couple of poorly-trained and even more poorly-equipped border guards are all that exist to prevent the flow of addictive drugs into Russia.

One charity group raised the money to buy some of border guards drug-sniffing dogs. The dogs starved when the guards sold the dog food for the cash they could get for themselves.

After the U.S.S.R. broke up, many of the newly independent countries had little industry to support their populations. This economic stress encouraged more people to seek employment with the drug traffickers. Kazakhstanis or Tajikistanis willing to take a risk may load their donkeys with illicit drugs and cross the frontier, making more in one trip than their friends are making in a month at a legitimate job, if they can even find one. Others, especially in Kazakhstan, will swallow condoms filled with heroin and fly into Russia, where they drink down cheap alcohol and vomit up the packages of heroin.

Corruption among law enforcement officials and border or customs authorities also contribute to the relative ease with which drugs make their way into Russia. It’s estimated that no more than ten percent of the drugs being smuggled in are detected.

Open Borders Begin to Create More Addicts

As these new channels of trafficking stabilized and expanded, the ones who suffered most were those who sought the oblivion of heroin use and then became addicted. One indicator of the increase in drug use is the number of drug-related crimes. The Russian Federal Service for the Control of Narcotics reported that by 2006, this type of crime leapt to a level fifteen times that of 1996. Added to this rise was a ten-fold increase in the number of drug users known to the government. And the number of regions acknowledging a problem with “serious abusers” grew from four regions in 1985 to more than thirty by 2000.

Many addicts in Russia register with the state in the hope of obtaining addiction treatment. But registration has its downside. Registered abusers can’t get some types of jobs and will not be issued a driver’s license. Registering often confers few benefits as evidenced by the fact that most people are removed from the list when they die, not because they recover from their addictions. The life expectancy of a Russian heroin addict is between four and four-and-a-half years.

Russia’s young people are the ones suffering from the highest rate of opiate addiction, which may be due in part to the shortened life expectancies. Additionally, the average age at which they first use drugs keeps dropping. In the last ten years, it fell from 17 to 14 years of age.

Of those who register with the state, perhaps ten percent will finally enter addiction treatment. Russian drug addiction treatment is referred to as “narcology” and is an heir to old Russian psychiatry. In many cases, the entirety of addiction treatment is a medical detoxification in which other drugs are used to speed detoxification. The addict is then likely to be discharged with a handful of antipsychotic medications or barbiturates to take home. If further treatment is administered, it will probably be in the form of hypnotic commands that convince the addict that if he drinks or takes drugs again, he will die. Some reports estimate that 90 percent of treated addicts relapse in the first year.

Only a third of Russia’s regions possess an addiction treatment facility. As Russia stretches across six and a half million miles, this leaves many millions of people far from any help. While official estimates vary, some reports state that 70,000 Russians die annually from drug overdoses and 50,000 more die from alcohol abuse.

In light of this desperate scene, it becomes understandable why, a few years ago, the Mayor of Moscow suggested that Russia implement laws like those in Singapore that allow drug traffickers to be executed for their crimes.

The people of any society deserve drug rehabilitation that works, not something that buries the spirit under more drugs or hypnotic commands. The outdated technology of narcology in Russia needs to be replaced by a more updated, effective and most importantly, humane technology that actually helps restore the citizens of Russia to productive citizenship and the enjoyment of life to which they are entitled.