Kremlin Reports 46,000 Addicts as Drug Abuse Grows

Interior Minister Alexander V. Vlasov said Tuesday that the Soviet Union has 46,000 drug addicts and that narcotics abuse is a rapidly growing problem.

Vlasov made the statement in an interview with the Communist Party newspaper Pravda. His remarks constitute the most detailed official report on drug abuse ever made public here.

In 1984, when the government was trying to minimize the narcotics problem, a high official said there were 2,500 drug addicts among the Soviet Union’s 270 million people. If the earlier figure and Vlasov’s are both accurate, the number of addicts is now 18 times what it was less than three years ago but still relatively low by comparison with addiction statistics in Western countries.

Emphasizing his country’s crackdown on narcotics, Vlasov said that 4,000 people working in drug production were arrested in a single police raid last year, and this suggests that his figure for the number of addicts may be low. It refers only to those who have been “medically diagnosed.”

Historically, the Kremlin has contended that drug addiction is an important problem only in capitalist countries, where organized crime takes advantage of a sense of hopelessness.

Grim Picture Seen

But in the last six months or so, the Soviet press has painted a grim picture of youthful addiction in the Soviet Union, in large cities like Moscow as well as in the traditional drug-using areas of Central Asia, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Vlasov said that official silence on drug use may have contributed to the problem.

Warning Against Smugness

Still, he said, the number of addicts in the Soviet Union is much lower than it is in the United States. He said there are 30 million addicts in the United States, but he cautioned against taking comfort in the West’s problem.

The source of Vlasov’s figure on U.S. addicts is unclear. The U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse, reporting on a survey of American households conducted last year, estimated that 12.2 million people used cocaine during 1985 and that 18.2 million people used marijuana during the same period. That survey, however, reflected usage, not addiction.

Vlasov conceded that drug usage in the Soviet Union has increased over the last five years, and he added that 80% of the users are younger than 30. Many, he said, “already have a criminal record.”

Vlasov said that in a campaign known as “Operation Poppy 86,” the police focused on producers and peddlers rather than addicts. He said that 3,000 plantations of opium poppies and 100,000 acres of marijuana were destroyed and that 4,000 producers and 300 couriers were arrested.

Severe Erosion Cited

The police encountered resistance in the Chu Valley of Kazakhstan, the main source of Soviet marijuana, on grounds that destroying the crop would result in severe erosion of the land, he said.

Vlasov said it has become possible to bring the drug problem out into the open because of the atmosphere of “truth and openness” created by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

“I wouldn’t say we never had this evil before,” he told the Pravda interviewer, “but public discussion of such ulcers was not encouraged. We must admit that silence about the extreme danger of drug addiction blunted social awareness, weakened the attention and vigor of the police and the medical profession, lowered vigilance of parents, schools and public opinion. This silence actually encouraged the spread of drug addiction.”

Nonetheless, he criticized some newspapers for publishing what he called sensational details about drug-induced euphoria and the technology of producing narcotics.

“This created unhealthy curiosity and interest,” he said, and led young people to try drugs without realizing that “every gram of narcotics is pernicious.”

Vlasov said that three addicts in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, committed dozens of burglaries in order to get money for drugs. When they were arrested, he said, they had 50 pounds of narcotics with them.

When a young couple from a suburb of Moscow became addicted, he said, they were sent to prison, and their children to an orphanage.

“We must give wider exposure to the obscene nature of the drug den, the ugly face of the pusher and the moral deformity of the user,” he said.