The official leading Britain's fight against illegal drugs said on Thursday he was worried that traffickers were establishing new smuggling routes through Russia and Central Asia as police clamped down farther south.

Keith Hellawell, Britain's anti-drugs coordinator, said police had clamped down on routes from Pakistan via the Balkans to the West.

Traffickers were now forced to use what he called a northern route, from Afghanistan and Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in Central Asia via Russia.

"We believe this is something we ought to be concerned about now," Hellawell told reporters during a trip to Russia after meeting local drug fighting and health officials and seeing British-funded programs at work.

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FROM afar, lasers and strobe lights could be seen bursting mutely from within the island fort, as if it were being consumed by some mysterious battle, transforming it into a radiant beacon amid the 3 a.m. twilight covering the Gulf of Finland. But as the ferryboat loaded with young people docked after its three-hour voyage, music pulsating from the turreted fort broke the stillness. On the first weekend of July, as many as 10,000 of Russia's youth laid siege to an abandoned and crumbling Czarist structure some 30 miles off the coast of St. Petersburg for dancing, performance art and general merriment during the season of northern Russia's White Nights, when the sun sets for only three hours.

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Three plainclothes policemen walked into the Starlite Diner one evening this week for what they said was a routine document check as part of a city anti-terrorism operation.

They left after taking into custody the ousted director of a major vanadium mining complex, who they said was carrying heroin in his pockets.

Dzholol Khaidarov, who is fighting to be reinstated as head of the Urals-based Kachkanar Vanadium Mining Complex, or GOK, was arrested Tuesday evening on suspicion of heroin possession with intent to sell in what even prosecutors call a "strange" case.

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ALMATY, Kazakstan: NATO no longer sees Russia as a threat, but as a partner in efforts to combat weapons proliferation and drug smuggling, NATO Secretary-General George Robertson said in Kazakstan on Tuesday.

We no longer regard Russia as a menace," Robertson said during a visit to Kazakstan's capital Astana, in remarks carried on national television. He said Russia and the U.S.-led alliance are cooperating in fighting drug trafficking and weapons proliferation.

Robertson is on a tour of Central Asia for talks on regional security and military cooperation. He met Kazak officials Tuesday, and is to leave Wednesday for Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

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In an attempt to discourage drug abuse, the Federation Council this week approved a controversial amendment to the law on mass media forbidding all media, including the Internet, to disseminate information on the production, use and sale of illegal drugs.

The amendment, unanimously approved by parliament's upper house Wednesday, states that media outlets can not spread information about methods of "producing, preparing and using" drugs or about places where drugs are sold. Information about the medical advantages of illegal drugs via mass media is also prohibited.

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Dirt-Cheap Afghan Drugs Ravage Young People

St. Petersburg -- Katya had it all. The beautiful daughter of a wealthy businessman and his lawyer wife, she was one of Russia's golden youth, the privileged elite of an impoverished society.

She took her vacations in Paris and Prague. She hobnobbed with foreigners as a tour guide in St. Petersburg's palaces and museums. She was a final-year student at a prestigious law school.

But Katya had a secret. Twice a day, she searched for a vein in her arms, prepared a needle, and injected a quarter-gram of heroin.

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Against the backdrop of a dangerous rise in HIV and AIDS cases among adults, the number of children under 15 carrying the deadly virus remains relatively low. But AIDS experts say that due to a lack of medicines and no unified state policy, HIV-infected children often find themselves in more dire straits than adult patients.

"Adult patients can be treated with 16 medicines, while for children's therapy only five or six medicines are available in Russia," said Yevgeny Voronin, chief doctor of the St. Petersburg Infectious Diseases Hospital.

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In response to "The Siberian Side of AIDS," April 29.

Editor,

In addition to the outbreak in Irkutsk - as described in the aforementioned article - HIV/AIDS has now reached epidemic levels in many regions of Russia. And the outbreak is fueled almost entirely by drug use. What can be done?

Providing drug users with clean needles through syringe exchange programs dramatically decreases the spread of HIV and other blood-borne illnesses. Offering drug users methadone treatment is also an effective strategy.

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Addicts are being chained to their beds and drug dealers jabbed with needles in Russia’s desperate war against narcotics, reports Mark Franchetti in Yekaterinburg

LESS than a fortnight ago, heroin was the only thing on Stanislav’s mind. A drug addict for five years, he spent his time roaming the streets of Yekaterinburg, 1500km east of Moscow, breaking into homes and robbing people to pay for his next fix.

Twice he tried to break free of the addiction, but each time he injected himself only hours after leaving hospital. He may find it less easy to discharge himself a third time, however, daunt, bale and with sunken eyes, Stanislav, 21, is handcuffed to his bed, along with 16 other young addicts, as part of a drug rehabilitation program whose harsh methods have caused controversy across Russia.

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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.

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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.

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City Without Drugs Treats Addicts With A Controversial Program Of Discipline While Targeting Dealers With A Mix Of Grass-Roots Monitoring And Vigilantism.

YEKATERINBURG, Russia -- The Fund for a City Without Drugs makes no secret of its methods, but the scene at the group's drug-rehabilitation center still comes as a shock.

Young men lie on the springs of metal cots, their jean jackets serving as both sheets and mattresses. Their wrists are handcuffed to the beds. Their eyes are sunken, their faces pallid, their voices flat. They are prisoners, of both heroin and of the men who swear to help them.

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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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To the Editor:

Re "Russian Vigilantes Fight Drug Dealers" (news article, March 4):

In addition to the apolitical vigilante groups you describe, the violent neo-Nazi organization Russian National Unity has over the last few years profited from the lack of effective Russian police response to crime.

In Yekaterinburg, a police officer and four of his R.N.U. comrades raided suspected drug dealers' apartments throughout 1997. In January of last year, a judge ordered the men freed, praising their handiwork as socially useful.

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Vigilantes Allege Russia Needs Bitter Medicine

YEKATERINBURG, Russia -- Igor Varov, wearing a pistol on his hip, opens the sun roof of his big Mercedes 600 to remove the illegal flashing light he uses to maneuver through traffic on the icy streets of this industrial city in the Ural Mountains.

He and his colleague, Andrei Kabanov, are on the prowl in a poor neighborhood where the heroin addicts are out at dusk searching for dealers in the snowy courtyards and darkened stairwells. ``Look, there's some addicts,'' he says, as the silver sedan swings into an alley next to a dilapidated apartment block.

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YEKATERINBURG, Russia - Igor G. Varov, wearing a pistol on his hip, opens the sun roof of his big Mercedes 600 to remove the illegal flashing light he uses to maneuver through traffic on the icy streets of this industrial city in the Ural Mountains. He and his colleague, Andrei V. Kabanov, are on the prowl in a poor neighborhood where the heroin addicts are out at dusk searching for dealers in the snowy courtyards and darkened stairwells. "Look, there's some addicts," he says, as the silver sedan careered into the alley next to a dilapidated apartment block.

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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.

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MOSCOW, Oct 26, 1999 -- (Reuters) A top Russian crime fighter said on Monday breakaway Chechnya was harvesting opium poppies, producing heroin and selling the drug to growing numbers of Russian youngsters.

"Not only today but already two or three years ago, we have been seriously concerned about the production of drugs in Chechnya," Leonid Tantsorov, deputy head of the interior ministry's anti-drug department, told a news conference.

"According to information we have obtained there are sizeable fields where opium poppies are being grown and they are making it into morphine and heroin."

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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.

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Russia's lower house of Parliament passed a bill granting amnesty to tens of thousands of people convicted or charged with non-violent crimes. The bill, passed with 400 votes in the 450-seat Duma, comes into effect once the parliamentary newspaper publishes it, and it has to be carried out within six months.

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