RUSSIA RINGS ALARM BELLS ON DRUGS, HIV SURGE

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov drew a catastrophic
picture Tuesday of rocketing drugs use in Russia and warned the trend put
the country's future in jeopardy.

Drug addiction was spreading fastest among young people and brought deadly
diseases such as AIDS (news - web sites) in its wake, he said.
Drugs-related crime was also on the rise.

"The health of the generation which is due to take over from us is in
danger," Kasyanov was quoted by Interfax news agency as telling a
government meeting which discussed how best to tackle the problem.

A leading AIDS expert shared his view.

"The situation is very sad," Vadim Pokrovsky, head of the official AIDS
prevention center, told a news conference broadcast on internet site
www.presscentr.ru. "The speed of HIV (news - web sites) contamination has
risen sharply over the last three years."

"We are currently going through the peak of an epidemic among drug users.
In two or three years there will be another upsurge from sexual
transmission of the disease."

HIV is the human immunodeficiency virus which causes AIDS, a deadly illness
usually transmitted through needle-sharing by drug users and sexual
intercourse.

Kasyanov said the number of drug addicts in Russia had jumped 20-fold over
the last 10 years, adding that the official number of illegal drug users
which stood at 450,000 on January 1, 2001, was a fraction of the real figure.

Health officials estimate there may be as many as five million people
taking drugs in Russia. They say up to 60 percent of them are aged between
18 and 30 with pre-college teenagers accounting for another 20 percent.

Huge Dimensions

"Russia is no longer a transit point for drug trafficking but a consumption
market," Kasyanov said. "Drug crime is taking huge dimensions and really
threatens the health of the population and the future of the country."

He put illegal drug turnover in Russia at 70 billion roubles ($2.5 billion).

Russia, for years a stopover on the drug route between Central Asia and
Western Europe, become an important market in its own right in the
mid-1990s when rising incomes made hitherto expensive drugs more affordable.

The Interior Ministry says popular soft drugs originating from ex-Soviet
Central Asia are now giving way to imports of heroin from Afghanistan (news
- - web sites), cocaine from Latin America and synthetic drugs from Europe.

Pokrovsky said spiraling drug addiction was the main cause of an HIV
epidemic raging in Russia. The hotbed of the disease had moved from the
tiny Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad to Moscow and its suburbs.

"In some parts of the Moscow region, up to five percent of the young people
are already HIV positive. These are catastrophic figures and if we count it
as a percentage of the population, this year we are set to reach U.S.
levels," he said.

Pokrovsky said up to 700,000 Russians were HIV positive and were likely to
die from AIDS within the next 10 to 12 years. About 80 percent are aged 15
to 25, he said.

"They are the pick of our nation which we can lose in 10 years' time --
right when they have finished their education. That means one gets infected
at 20, graduates at 30, starts working and dies," he said.