ST. PETERSBURG -- Sitting on the sofa, smiling and relaxed in her track suit and slippers, Yelena, 22, looks as if she is enjoying a holiday break. Only the snow-white bandage on her shaved head shows that this jovial economics major underwent a brain operation just two days earlier.

"There was no alternative," she said firmly. "It was that or the cemetery. ... Or an overdose."

Yelena had been shooting up half a gram of heroin every day since 1998.

Earlier this year, she and her husband, Igor, 20, both decided to go for a costly, relatively new type of surgery - a bilateral cryocingulotomy - at St. Petersburg's renowned Institute of the Human Brain in hopes of putting an end to their drug addiction.

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