Pubdate: Monday, June 21, 1999
Source: Toronto Star (Canada)
Copyright: 1999, The Toronto Star
Contact:  http://www.thestar.com/
Page: D6
Author: Mitchell Landsberg, Associated Press

RUSSIA'S YOUNG GRAPPLE WITH DRUG EPIDEMIC

MOSCOW -- She was just a kid when the whole drug thing hit. She's
still just a kid, actually, barely 20, but Olya has the depth of vast
experience now in her soft brown eyes.

"It all happened immediately, at one time," she recalls. "There was
nothing and then everything came at once. Heroin chic. Tarantino. The
music, everything. Sick, pale girls were in fashion."

She smoked pot at 14, took hallucinogens at 15 and heroin at
17.

Today, she is sadder and wiser, but has no regrets. "It was a great
life," she says without irony.

Russia is in the throes of a drug epidemic. Cheap heroin is flooding
into the country from Afghanistan; cocaine, Ecstasy and LSD from the
West; marijuana from Central Asia and the Russian south.

Poorly paid border guards and police are easily bribed by drug
dealers. Long-term drug treatment is mostly unheard of, except in
expensive private clinics available only to a few rich. Short-term
treatment is available, but largely ineffective.

Pyotr Kamenchenko is one of Russia's few psychiatrists with extensive
experience treating drug addiction.

"When I was a student, from 1976 to '82, there wasn't any case of drug
usage in my college," Kamenchenko recalls. "Maybe marijuana, but only
a few people and only a few times."

Later, he would get to know young rockers who were fast becoming
national stars, and fast slipping into serious drug use. Being the
only psychiatrist they knew and trusted -- even today, he wears lots
of black leather and writes rock music reviews -- Kamenchenko became
the unofficial drug counsellor for the rock scene.

Tatyana, 24, has dark circles under her eyes and blond hair sheared
off at mid-neck level. By her account, she was the prototypical "good
girl," always the best in the class, the pride of her family. She was
also a social outcast, ignored by the kids she envied, the cool,
smart, disaffected ones.

Eventually, she began to cross the line.

"I wanted to experience something new -- strong sensations. I wanted
to be like these friends who were showing me a different side of
life," recalls Tatyana, who, like other drug users, asks that her last
name not be published.

She speaks in a dead voice while sitting on a couch in an office in
Moscow's Narcological Hospital No. 17. A gloomy complex of tall,
gritty brick buildings, the hospital has 2,900 beds and treats 20,000
patients a year for drug and alcohol abuse. These days, 80 per cent of
its patients are heroin users.

Tatyana came to the hospital to break a heroin habit she began six
years earlier, when she was 18. It was cheap and fun at first, and
thrilling. Eventually, she was spending 400 rubles a day on heroin --
about one-third of an average monthly salary in Russia. She stole some
of it from her parents; she wouldn't talk about how she got the rest.

Now, after 42 days of detoxification and short-term rehabilitation,
she is nearing release. She is nervous and scared and ashamed.

She is also HIV-positive, something she'd just learned.

"There isn't any worse punishment," Tatyana says, eyes filled with
pain.

How did this happen? Tatyana has her own ideas.

"Before, in the Soviet era, there were very rigid rules people had to
follow, where they were afraid to even speak about certain things in
their own kitchens. Then, with this democracy, I believe it took on a
monstrous quality, in which everything is allowed, with no
restrictions. It's a deluge."

Sergei Zolotuchin, the first deputy chief doctor of Narcological
Hospital No. 17, blames other things, as well -- the "absence of
clear-cut state policies."

In Soviet times, he says, there was at least something to believe in,
a "national idea," however flawed.

Now, "with the destruction of all ideals," a sense of nihilism has
descended on Russia. It's a natural environment for drugs.

"Look," says Kamenchenko, "in the Soviet Union, your life was
programmed. School, army, marriage -- planned, planned, planned. Then
pensian. Dacha (country house). Death. You couldn't move away from
this.

"Now, there are a lot more possibilities. There are a lot of people
who are using these possibilities to make a lot of quick money. They
can make it on drugs.

"Tarantino films are like a blueprint for the younger generation.
Everything is possible. Drugs are possible, sex is possible, to make
money is possible, to be a criminal is possible."
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