Window on Eurasia

Drug Seizures Up in Russia But So Too is Drug Abuse

Paul Goble

Vienna, June 27, 2006 – The senior Russian government official responsible for combatting drug abuse proudly announced yesterday that his officers had seized five tons of heroin last year, five times more than the
annual average of the early years of this decade and an indecation that
Russia has stopped the growth in drug addiction.

But also yesterday – the International Day for the Struggle with Drug
Addiction – a new poll suggested that the number of Russians who use
illegal drugs or know people who do has increased by almost 50 percent
over the last three years, a trend that casts doubt on assertions that
Moscow has turned the corner in its fight against drug abuse.

Viktor Cherkesov, the director of the Federal Service for Narcotics
Control, said that increased efforts by Russian authorities over the
last several years had “succeeded in stopping the growth in drug
addiction,” RIA Novosti and other agencies reported
[http://www.rustrana.ru/print.php?nid=24689].

As evidence of this, the Russian counter-narcotics chief noted that in
2001-2003, Russian officials seized an average of one ton of heroin a
year, while in 2005, they succeeded in confiscating approximately five
tons of this extremely addictive and dangerous drug.

Cherkesov did not discuss whether the five tons of heroin seized last
year was in fact a more significant share of the total traffic in
illegal drugs or whether in fact the amount of such illegal substances
on Russian markets may in fact have increased dramatically over this
same period.

One disturbing indication of that possibility was provided also
yesterday by the release of a Levada Center poll on drug abuse. Some
1600 Russians in 46 regions of the country were asked how serious they
felt the drug problem to be in Russia and whether either they or people
they knew were using drugs
[http://www.levada-center.ru/], June 26.

According to the poll, 77 percent of Russians currently consider drug
abuse to be a very serious problem, down from 88 percent in 2002, but
if one combines the percentage viewing it as either very serious or quite
serious, the percentages are roughly the same in both years, 99 percent
in the first and 97 percent now.

Then those in the sample were asked whether they knew people among
their own families or circle of acquaintances who use or have used one or
another kind of narcotics illegally. The percentage answering yes to
that question has risen from 15 percent in 2003 to 23 peprcent in 2006,
an increase of almost 50 percent and representing millions of Russians.

Younger people, those with high incomes, and residents of the Urals,
Far Eastern and North Western Fedreal districts as well as of Moscow and
other major cities were more likely to answer yes, the Levada Center
reported. Those with other demographic characteristics were thus more
likely to answer no.

Asked directly whether they were using drugs illegally, six percent of
Russians acknowledged that they were, up one percent from the year
before. On the one hand, that is well within the poll’s statistical
margin of error. But on the other, this figure is almost certainly an
understatement given the other numbers the Levada Center reported.