Opium Habit a Growing Woe Among Hopeless of Central Asia

Stealing up on the abandoned building from behind, the narcotics police burst in on a grubby opium den.

Two men are slumped glassy-eyed against the wall on makeshift mattresses. As usual, the dealers who supply them are nowhere to be found.

“We could put these small-time guys in jail for a year or two, but what good would it do?” says one officer, Akbar Alimzhanov, who lets the men off after a stern chat.

Opium addiction is spreading rapidly in Osh, the heart of a drug boom in Central Asia. Long a producer of opium poppies--traded legally for pharmaceutical purposes in Soviet times--Kyrgyzstan is experiencing a worsening drug problem of its own.

With industry destroyed and unemployment soaring in the transition from Soviet communism to a free-market economy, more and more of the opium and heroin that drug traffickers smuggle in from Afghanistan goes no farther.

In private apartments or building ruins, all referred to by police as drug dens, Kyrgyz from their teens to middle age try to escape the drudgery by gathering to shoot up or smoke.

Ivan, a gray-haired ethnic Russian who looks far older than his 40 years, used to be chief engineer at a factory. First the plant went under in 1992, then he did.

Now he fixes TVs and tape recorders part-time, with a single purpose in mind: getting high as often as possible.

In the gloom of the filthy room, he unwraps and methodically prepares a small packet of opium. First he plunges the needle into the neck of his friend, Albert. Then he injects into his own groin.

“I’d shoot up 10 times a day if I could,” Ivan says. “I don’t expect anything else out of life.” Then he adds: “But anybody who tries it--it’s already the end for them.”