Abstract
Suggesting that nonalcoholic drug abuse can eliminate the Russian nation “in the very near future” is undoubtedly hyperbolic, but the available data on the evolving status of this pathology in the Russian Federation are indeed worrisome. Thus, the findings from one of the most comprehensive surveys to date, conducted in 1992, on drug abuse among residents of urban centers in Russia, reportedly “exceeded all expectations,” with 11.5 percent of the respondents (and 23 percent of them in Moscow) admitting that they had consumed unspecified illicit “narcotics” at least once, whereas researchers had hypothesized that the respective figure would be between 2 and 3 percent.1 Overall, this survey concludes that a “fundamentally new narco-situation” has emerged in Russia.2
Drug addiction is a door that only opens one way. It is very rare for people to return. In short, this problem can eliminate us as a nation in the very near future. We are talking about self-preservation. This metaphor suggests itself here: AIDS and Chernobyl taken together.
—Oblastnaia gazeta (Ekaterinburg), March 19, 1996, p. 2.
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Notes
For information on this subject, see Mary Schaeffer Conroy, “Abuse of Drugs Other than Alcohol and Tobacco in the Soviet Union,” Soviet Studies (July 1990): 447–480.
The estimate of approximately 11 million drug addicts in the RF is made in Aleksandr Kolesnikov, “Narkomaniia v Rossii: Sostoianie, tendentsii, puti preodoleniia,” Informatsionnyi shornik “Bezopasnost,” no.11–12 (December 1998): 8. The estimate of between 10 and 15 million illicit users is in Literaturnaia gazeta, 5 November 1997.
U.S. Department of State, Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, 1997 (Washington, D.C.: 1998). Estimates on drug prices in Moscow from the Ministry of the Interior reported in Moscow News, 4–10 February 1999.
For a detailed analysis of the status of drug abuse in the USSR and the responses of the Soviet regime to it, see John M. Kramer, “Drug Abuse in the USSR,” in Soviet Social Problems, eds. Anthony Jones, Walter D. Connor, David E. Powell (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), 94–118.
U.S. Department of State, Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, International Narcotics Control Strategy Report,1996 (Washington, D.C.: 1997) notes the establishment of the MVD Main Administration on Illegal Drug Trafficking. See INTERFAX, 17 September 1998, for the announcement of the newly established “experimental police force.”
U.S. Department of State, Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, 1998 (Washington, D.C.: 1999).
Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on Virginia (1782),” cited in H. L. Mencken, A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles (New York: Knopf: 1946), 223.
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© 2000 Mark G. Field and Judyth L. Twigg
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Kramer, J.M. (2000). Drug Abuse in Post-Communist Russia. In: Field, M.G., Twigg, J.L. (eds) Russia’s Torn Safety Nets. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62712-7_6
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