Rising Use Admitted : Drug Abuse Is Bitter Pill for Soviets

When a young official from Soviet Central Asia recently checked into the huge Rossiya Hotel, a minute’s walk from the Kremlin, a drowsy desk clerk examined his internal passport and quickly snapped to attention.

It was not a sense of duty that aroused the clerk. The official’s documents showed that he came from the city of Samarkand. Leaning closer, the clerk inquired discreetly whether he had brought any plan --Russian slang for marijuana--to sell.

No, the official replied, he had not. But the question was no surprise. Samarkand in the last few years has become known not only as a center of marijuana cultivation but also as a source of opium-based drugs from illicit poppy fields hidden in the foothills of the nearby Alay mountains.

Home-Grown Problem

Contrary to assertions by Radio Moscow, and indeed for many years by virtually the whole of Soviet officialdom, the Soviet Union does have a drug problem. It is almost entirely a home-grown problem--drug smuggling by soldiers returning from Afghanistan appears to be the main exception--and the scale of habitual use is still much smaller than in the United States and some other Western countries.

Moreover, there is little evidence to suggest that cocaine--a tropical drug--or drugs that require significant chemical processing, such as heroin or LSD, have appeared on the scene. A militarized border and a web of state controls over laboratory equipment and industrial chemicals give the Soviet Union an advantage over Western nations in this respect.

Yet the problem does exist. What is more, all indications suggest that it is spreading at an alarming rate beyond the traditional areas of drug use in the southern tier of republics, consisting of Central Asia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia, and into the major cities of the Russian heartland--Moscow among them--as well as westward into the Ukraine and north to the Baltic region.

Spreading to Cities

As a blunt yet poignant letter published last month in the local Moscow newspaper Moskovskaya Pravda put it, “We smoke dope.”

Written by a vocational school student who identified herself only as Sveta M., the letter told of a friend--”a regular junkie”--who stole drugs from his psychiatrist-uncle and another who nearly died from a drug-induced allergy as her terrified companions stood by, afraid to summon an ambulance and the inevitable police.

“Parents, it seems, notice nothing,” Sveta wrote. “They are outraged when people on television talk about drug addicts in the West, and they don’t suspect that their own son or daughter has been playing with these dangerous ‘toys.’ ”

Only a few years ago, drug use in Moscow appeared to be confined mainly to hospital, veterinary and ambulance workers and their friends, who made off with ampules of liquid barbiturates and other painkillers for their own use.

In the army, a draftee’s choice of intoxicant still followed ethnic lines: Russians drank vodka they smuggled into the barracks, while Georgians and other southerners, shunned and disparaged by the Russians, preferred the anasha --hashish--that friends and relatives hid in packages of food and clothing from home.

Now, however, Russian teen-agers in Moscow are talking casually about puffing plan and anasha, popping tranquilizers, sniffing chemical fumes and drinking a toxic, mind-numbing concoction known as “BF,” or “Boris Fyodorovich,” made from butylphenol glue.

Varnish and ‘Toxicomania’

A seventh-grade teacher’s introduction to toxic-substance abuse came in school one day recently after workmen had varnished some classroom floors. Puzzled by the glassy eyes and wobbly gait that some of her students displayed, the teacher crouched down in one of the freshly varnished rooms, inhaled the fumes and promptly discovered what the Russians are now calling “toxicomania.”

Even if they haven’t yet experienced a drug-induced kaif, Russian slang for “high,” growing numbers of teen-agers and even preteens seem familiar with the jargon and the chemistry.

Along with the spreading use of drugs, a new vocabulary has suffused the language. Young Russians talk knowingly about “shooting up” ( kolotsya-- literally, pricking oneself), getting high ( kaifovat ), getting off the needle, and withdrawal ( lomka , the Russian word for “breaking.”)

Most troubling of all, the technique of boiling down the stems and seed pods of ordinary poppies and injecting the resulting opiate infusion--a practice that has led to widespread addiction and needle-borne hepatitis in Poland and Hungary since the early 1970s--appears to be catching on among Soviet youth.

Drug Abuse Is Written About

More remarkable than the mere existence of drug abuse in the Soviet Union is the fact that, for the first time, the state-controlled press is talking about it.

Since April, when local Moscow newspapers first broke a longstanding taboo on the subject, leading newspapers have published half a dozen articles that have included reports of drug arrests, interviews with addicts undergoing compulsory treatment, letters from concerned citizens and teen-age users, and an expose of large-scale thefts from fields of poppies grown by the state for seed and medicines.

A report in the June 26 issue of Izvestia, the main government newspaper, disclosed that authorities are using helicopters to pinpoint illicit poppy fields in Uzbekistan and other areas of Central Asia. It said that there have been instances of multiple deaths from “sniffing chemicals,” a growing practice among preteen children.

Other reports have drawn a connection between drug use and crimes, from apartment burglaries to murder, and have hinted at the involvement of organized crime.

Money to Be Made

As elsewhere, there is money to be made here in drugs. According to unofficial sources, a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of morphine diverted from state pharmaceutical supplies has a black market value of 200,000 rubles--$280,000 at the official rate of exchange, or $50,000 at the more relevant black market rate.

“The ‘kings’ of the criminal world are staking claim to the still immature psyches of teen-agers,” the Moscow youth newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets warned on April 18. “They play on curiosity, suggestibility, on the desire to imitate. It is no secret that they look for the ‘little sons’ of families for whom material values long ago pushed spiritual and moral order into the background.”

In addition, local television in the Black Sea republic of Georgia, where the use of marijuana and drugs diverted from medical supplies has been a chronic problem, recently broadcast a documentary film on the perils of addiction.

All this marks a dramatic turnaround in the Soviet approach to drug abuse. Until this spring, senior officials simply dismissed it as a feature of Western moral decay that not only did not exist in the Soviet Union but could not.

Abuse Downplayed

Last year, for example, the government’s dominant authority on drug abuse and its representative to the U.N. Commission on Narcotic Drugs, Dr. Eduard A. Babayan, said that his country of 277 million people could count only 2,500 drug addicts, nearly all of whom were said to be disabled medical patients addicted to prescription painkillers. Babayan contrasted this with the half a million heroin addicts he said were running loose in the United States.

“Why, then, is the situation so different in the Soviet Union?” he said in an interview with Radio Moscow. “The most important thing in my view is that our society is free from the social and economic causes which drive people to the precipice of despair and force them to seek comfort in artificial stimulants.”

He listed unemployment, discrimination, prostitution and vagrancy as leading causes of drug use in the West, all of which, he insisted, have been eliminated in the Soviet Union.

At the same time, censorship strictly limited discussion of drug abuse, except as it served to illustrate the West’s asserted decadence and the contrasting moral strength of Soviet society.

‘The Less Said, the Better’

“It is not accidental that very little is being written about drug addiction here,” Babayan, until recently a senior official with the Ministry of Health, wrote in 1975, a year after the Soviet Union, with little fanfare, adopted tough new laws imposing prison sentences of up to 10 years for drug trafficking.

“No one can read detailed stories on this subject (in the Soviet press),” Babayan explained, “because this is the very kind of information about which one can say, ‘The less said, the better.’ ”

Now the message is very different. With the state having tackled alcoholism with a drastic anti-drinking campaign a year ago, a leading psychiatrist wrote in May, “It has become obvious that it’s also time to turn the attention of society to the fearful vice that is drug addiction.”

In June, the youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda explained the sudden surge of discussion by saying that “it is necessary to have at least minimal information . . . to know what one is fighting.”

Dramatic Turnabout

This about-face appears to be one of the more vivid results of a campaign launched by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev for glasnost , or openness, in the press. Even if the call for openness did not extend to national emergencies like the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, it does seem to apply to social issues like drugs.

Perhaps coincidentally, the Izvestia report last month named Gorbachev’s home region of Stavropol as one of several afflicted with “much higher percentages of drug addicts” than other areas.

(The new policy also coincides with Babayan’s quiet departure from the scene. A spokesman for the Ministry of Health said Babayan no longer works there but was unable to say when he left or where he had gone.)

Alarm at the geographic spread of drug abuse has also spurred a lifting of the veil. The topic was deemed important enough to raise at the 27th Communist Party Congress in February. In April, newspapers reported that Boris N. Yeltsin, the energetic new chief of the Moscow city party organization and a Gorbachev protege, had ordered police and health agencies in the capital to “drastically improve” anti-drug education programs and to “do away with the conditions that encourage this ugly phenomenon.”

Focus on Poppy Growers

Marijuana and toxic-substance abuse are worrisome enough, but the focus of official concern appears to be the large-scale diversion of poppies from state-run farms scattered from the western Ukraine to the Volga uplands, a span of more than 1,000 miles.

The dazzling red flowers are cultivated partly for the medical industry but mainly for seed. Poppy-seed cake is a traditional East European dessert, and the seed oil is an ingredient of paints. Soviet press reports are deliberately vague about methods of illicit processing, but young Russians, like Poles and Hungarians, seem to have learned the simple technique of cooking a crude opium extract from the poppy plant.

This appears to be the drug Russians call koknar , a term Soviet reports have used without explaining. Poles call it kompot , an ironic play on the name of a healthful drink made from stewed fruit.

Soviet officials have disclosed no estimates for the number of drug users, but the potential for abuse is clearly greater than in Poland, where officials count 35,000 opiate addicts and estimate 200,000 additional users in a population less than one-seventh the size of the Soviet Union’s.

‘Tourists’ Arrive Early

“The poppies are hardly in bloom before the ‘tourists’ appear in the villages, as the kolkhozniks (collective farmers) call drug users,” the Komsomolskaya Pravda reported in June from the central Volga city of Kuibyshev. In keeping with a customary practice of the Soviet press, it focused on one illustrative region and only hinted at similar problems elsewhere in the Ukraine.

“They come in cars. In groups. On motorcycles. From Orenburg and Krasnodar. They even come from the Baltic region,” 1,000 miles to the north, the newspaper said, not to admire the beauty of the crimson fields but to raid them.

It noted that farmers sometimes find syringes and scraps of gauze in the fields, indicating that some of the raiders cook up, filter and inject opiates on the spot before stealing away with bags of poppy seed pods.

Local officials were quoted as saying that raids on the fields constitute an entirely new law enforcement problem that calls for the “most urgent, the most effective steps” while it it is still of manageable scale.

A police official in Kuibyshev compared the easy availability of the raw base for narcotics to turning on a water faucet and having moonshine flow out. The chairman of a collective farm, Nikolai V. Myaskin, remarked that “only the lazy don’t collect these flower heads.”

Impossible to Guard

To local officials, guarding the fields is an obvious solution, but not to the man who had to implement it.

“Guard them? How?” Myaskin asked. “I don’t have a helicopter. There’s one guard for every 250 hectares (618 acres), and he doesn’t patrol the fields in a car but on horseback.”

Officials from the regional prosecutor’s office, police and farm managers met in January to consider the problem and came up with the idea of building watchtowers in the fields. “But how many are needed?” the embattled chairman persisted. “How many people are needed to man them? Where do I find these guards?”

“These measures accomplish nothing,” said Gen. G.A. Dankov, chief of the regional police. “You create an outward show of activity, so as to say steps have been taken, you can live in peace.”

Public Awareness Urged

He said the Interior Ministry is organizing new anti-drug units, working on installing electric alarm systems in the poppy fields and studying the experience of the Kharkov district, in the distant Ukraine, which has reportedly consolidated widely separated poppy fields to make them easier to guard. Beyond this, the general said, public awareness is vital.

As a warning to others, the newspaper told the story of a 23-year-old truck driver recruited by drug dealers in the Kuibyshev area to pick half a dozen bags of poppy heads along his route, where unguarded fields of flowers stretched for miles. He reportedly had reaped 100 rubles a bag--two weeks’ average wages in the Soviet Union--and six years in prison, one per bag, when the gang was caught.

Letters and comments in the Soviet press have pointed to several plausible reasons for the surge in drug abuse, none of them profound. The search for deeper explanations still seems hung up on the shoals of ideology, which insists that only the West can have systemic social defects of the kind that proliferate drug addiction.

An Added Compulsion

Drugs are said to be fashionable. Young Soviets are as curious and as vulnerable to peer pressure as any, and they feel an added compulsion to be part of the world at large, to do what Western teen-agers do. In addition, the current anti-drinking campaign has made vodka and brandy more expensive and harder to find, prompting the search for substitutes.

Yet the official press still insists that the Soviet Union’s drug problem cannot possibly have anything in common with the West’s affliction.

“In the Soviet Union, there are none of the social causes that push young people into the narcotics whirlpool in the West,” as Moskovsky Komsomolets assured its readers recently. “We have to look elsewhere for the roots of our misfortune, in defects in the upbringing of teen-agers in the family and the school.”