Drugs: Blame the West

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by Susan Richards 23 November 2009 A WESTERN PLOT?

Afghanistan is the source of Russian heroin. Indeed, according to the latest UN report, Russia is its largest market: the country consumes three times more than the United States and Canada put together, or 21 percent of the world heroin market.

So perhaps it is hardly surprising that Russian officials are reverting to a favorite refrain to deflect blame from the government for its failure to tackle the drugs problem: it is all the fault of the West. The Western allies could be doing more to stop the heroin trade: “It is being brought to Russia across the unprotected, transparent, and I would call them virtual borders, which were established after the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Viktor Ivanov says. A hundred and eighty Afghan drug cartels are busy trafficking opiates to the Russian Federation, he goes on to point out, and most of these are operating in Afghan provinces that are under the control of coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Speaking in the course of a debate on OST at the recent Eastern European and Central Asia AIDS Conference on 30 October, General Nikolai Tsvetkov of the FDCS went as far as to liken the attempts by UN agencies and donor countries to introduce OST programs into Russia to Britain’s foisting of opium on the Chinese in the 19th century.

Western officials regard this as a familiar exercise in blame-shifting. Russia’s rate of interdiction, at an estimated 4 percent, is regarded as extremely low by international standards. While a number of experts agree that Russia’s drug squads staffed by police are capable of holding their own against their Western counterparts, they claim that [regular police] are hampered in their pursuit of heroin traffickers by the inefficiency and corruption of the FDCS. This body was cobbled together in 2003 from the ranks of former tax inspectors and FSB officers and has little operational expertise or experience of running covert operations against organized criminal networks. Indeed, a number of senior officers in the FDCS have been arrested for fraud in relation to drug prevention activities, drug trafficking, and extortion. According to newspaper reports, in July this year, two of its senior officers were found dead in one of the Moscow district FDCS offices. Apparently, the cause of their death was heroin overdose.

BATTLING FOR CONTROL OF THE POST-SOVIET SPACE

Recent Russian pronouncements suggest that it regards attempts by the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime to set up harm reduction programs in the CIS countries as a part of the larger battle for control by the West of the post-Soviet space. “All CIS countries are today actively introducing harm reduction and substitution programs,” Health Minister Golikova reported to Russia’s Security Council last month. “This is of course accompanied by programs for the legalization of drugs prohibited on the territory of the Russian Federation.” Having lost its battle to persuade Belarus, Ukraine, and Georgia to drop such programs, Russia is now putting pressure on Kazakhstan. Earlier this year Uzbekistan did pull the plug on its OST program having “conducted research” – research which Uzbek officials have refused to make public.

It is this kind of politicization of the issue, which is condemning young addicts in Russia to death and exacerbating the HIV epidemic, that makes Geoffrey Monaghan despair: “I say to them ‘Look, if we really wanted to damage Russia we would be saying, ‘Don’t set up OST programs, stop NSPs and whatever you [do], don’t promote harm reduction!’ ”

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