President Vladimir V. Putin declared drug addiction the equivalent of a natural disaster, citing new figures showing Russia has 500,000 registered drug users, three-quarters of them under 30. Experts say the true figure may be four or five times as great. While there has been a relative decline in drug use among the young, "we cannot afford to sit idly by," Mr. Putin said. Drug use has grown since the Soviet collapse in 1991, largely because Russia's southern borders have been porous routes for smugglers of opium and heroin. [end]
The number of Latvians known to carry H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, grew last year by 84 percent and the number of new infections soared by 73 percent over the previous year, the deputy director of the National AIDS Prevention Center said. Four in five new infections were caused by needle-sharing among drug users, the deputy director, Inga Upmerce, said. Although the number of new infections in the nation of 2.4 million people remains tiny, at 807, and the total number of infections is only 1,765, the rate of increase is worrisome and demands new prevention tactics, she said. Latvia, like some other former Soviet republics, is experiencing one of the world's most rapid increases in infection. [end]
John E. Tobin Jr., the Fulbright scholar from Connecticut, was freed from a Russian prison camp after his captors told a local court that he had been a model inmate, good at woodworking, sports and churchgoing. No one mentioned the case's bizarre course: Russian accusations that he was not only a drug user but an American spy-in-training (he once served in an Army reserve intelligence unit) -- and his own allegation that Russian agents manufactured the drug charge after he refused to become their informant. Mr. Tobin was silent after his release from a prison sentence that once totaled 37 months. But the warden gave him souvenirs and promised to e-mail. [end]
MOSCOW, Aug. 3 -- John E. Tobin Jr., the jailed American Fulbright scholar, walked out of a southwest Russian prison today a free man, paroled hours earlier on a minor marijuana conviction that briefly threatened to blossom into an international espionage drama. A district court in the small town of Rossosh, near the Ukrainian border, ordered Mr. Tobin released this morning at the urging of officials at the prison camp there, who described him as an exemplary inmate. He had served roughly six months of a 37-month sentence -- later reduced to one year -- for possessing less than two-tenths of an ounce of marijuana and sharing it with others. The police said they found marijuana in his clothes and in his apartment after they seized him outside a nightclub in Voronezh, 280 miles south of Moscow. [continues 963 words]
A court in the southwest city of Voronezh reduced to one year from 37 months the prison sentence of a 24-year-old American scholar, John Edward Tobin, who was convicted in April on marijuana-related charges. The court said Mr. Tobin would be sent to a prison camp in Mordovia, south of Moscow, within six days. Mr. Tobin, a Fulbright scholar who was studying at Voronezh State University, has said he was framed by the police; Russian officials have suggested that he may be granted a pardon should he request one. [end]
MOSCOW, April 27 -- A court in Voronezh, in southwest Russia, convicted a visiting American Fulbright scholar on drug charges today and sentenced him to 37 months in a penal colony. The verdict puts an official stamp on a seemingly minor marijuana infraction that swerved briefly and in bizarre fashion into suggestions of espionage. But it does not end the case, which now appears headed for an appeal. The American scholar, John Edward Tobin, a postgraduate student at Voronezh State University, was found guilty of possessing and distributing about two ounces of marijuana. Such offenses can carry sentences of up to four years in prison, but the judge reduced Mr. Tobin's sentence in part, she said, because fellow students attested to his good character. [continues 513 words]
MOSCOW, Feb. 28 -- The Federal Security Service said today that it had no further interest in an American student arrested on drug charges this month, who it said on Tuesday was training to become an American military spy. But other officials indicated that they might charge the American with more serious violations of narcotics law that could lead to a lengthy prison sentence. The American, John Edward Tobin, a graduate student in Voronezh, a southwestern city, under the State Department Fulbright scholar program, was arrested on Feb. 1 outside a nightclub after the police had found what they said was a half-ounce of marijuana in his clothes. The police said a search of his apartment found an additional one and a half ounces of marijuana. [continues 320 words]
Relatively sheltered from the AIDS epidemic threatening the rest of the country, the Irkutsk region had - until a year ago - less than 100 registered cases of HIV infection. Now the influx of heroin has led to a dramatic rise in the spread of the deadly virus. New York Times correspondent Michael Wines reports from Eastern Siberia. Thirteen months ago, a young man from Irkutsk's rough-and-tumble north side appeared at the government railroad workers' hospital complaining of a head wound suffered in a family fight. A blood work-up soon showed that it was the least of his problems: He was also infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. [continues 2410 words]
IRKUTSK, Russia, April 22 -- Thirteen months ago, a young man from this city's rough-and-tumble north side appeared at the government railroad workers' hospital complaining of a head wound suffered in a family fight. A blood work-up soon showed that it was the least of his problems: he was also infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. That was unusual. In the entire Irkutsk region, a Siberian expanse big enough to accommodate France and England in one gulp, health officials had recorded fewer than 200 H.I.V. infections since record-keeping began in 1991. [continues 1799 words]
MOSCOW Needle-sharing among intravenous drug users has set off an explosive increase in HIV infections, with the number of new cases reported in Moscow so far this year more than four times greater than in all of 1998, the World Health Organization said. The principal AIDS expert in Russia for the UN agency, Arkadiusz Majszyk, said the sharp increase was quite likely to continue for at least two or three more years, spreading to sexual partners before it levels off. [continues 389 words]
MOSCOW -- Poverty and political chaos have surely taken their toll on this nation. But for a look at what is really corroding Russia's soul, take the day off and go to the beach. That is what Muscovites are doing this month, and they are perishing in numbers that would stagger most Westerners. In the first 20 days of June, 89 people drowned in Moscow rivers and reservoirs. Over a long holiday weekend in mid- June, police fished at least 13 bodies out of Moscow waters every day -- the average number of daily drownings for the entire United States. [continues 555 words]
