DRUGS SNARE YOUNG

Social Issues: Heroin Is The Top Choice Among Russia's Increasingly Addicted
Population.

Moscow - She was just a kid when the drug thing hit. She's still just a kid,
barely 20, but Olya has the depth of vast experience now in her soft brown eyes.

She is sitting on a couch in her neighbor's apartment with one black combat
boot resting across her knee. Her blond hair is stubble length. There's a
hole in one ear where an earring might be. She exudes cool self-awareness -
and crushing self-doubt.

"It all happened immediately, at one time," she recalls. "There was nothing
and then everything came at once. Heroin chic. Tarantino. The music,
everything. Sick, pale girls were in fashion."

At the time, the early to mid-'90s, Olya was coming of age in a
soul-leaching Moscow suburb of identical, decaying apartment buildings.
Being young and smart and disaffected, she thought it was cool - "simply
interesting" - to do drugs.

She smoked pot at 14, took hallucinogens at 15 and heroin at 17.

Today, sadder and wiser, she has no regrets. "It was a great life," she says
without irony.

Russia is in the throes of a drug epidemic. Cheap heroin is flooding into
the country from Afghanistan; cocaine and Ecstasy and LSD from the West;
marijuana from Central Asia and the Russian south.

Heroin is the drug of choice at the moment. With little drug education,
there is no particular stigma attached to it. Western movies - such as
Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction," a huge hit in Russia - have, to some
extent, made it chic. And it is relatively abundant and cheap.

Poorly paid border guards and police are easily bribed by drug dealers.
Long-term drug treatment is mostly unheard of, except for the rich.
Short-term treatment is largely ineffective.

Pyotr Kamenchenko is one of Russia's few psychiatrists with extensive
experience treating drug addiction. Hanging around Russia's nascent rock
scene in the 1980s, he would get to know young rockers who were fast
becoming national stars, and fast slipping into serious drug use. Being the
only psychiatrist they knew and trusted - even today, he wears black leather
and writes rock music reviews - Kamenchenko became the unofficial drug
counselor for the rock scene.

Drug use then was strictly a fringe phenomenon. Russians were drinkers, not
drug users. But in the past decade, that has begun to change among the young
- - especially among the educated, urban young.

The government has a list of about 2 million officially registered drug
users, at least double the number of a decade ago. But even the most
sheltered bureaucrat knows that only hints at the problem. In some parts of
Moscow, drug use is rampant among people in their late teens and early 20s.

Tatyana, 24, with dark circles under her eyes and blond hair sheared off at
mid-neck level, comes from such a neighborhood.

By her account, she was the prototypical "good girl," always the best in the
class, the pride of her family. She was also a social outcast, ignored by
the cool, smart, disaffected kids. Eventually, she began to cross the line.

"I wanted to experience something new - strong sensations. I wanted to be
like these friends who were showing me a different side of life," recalled
Tatyana, who, like other drug users, asked to keep her last name private.

She spoke in a dead voice while sitting a a couch in an office in Moscow's
Narcological Hospital No. 17, the largest hospital for drug abusers in Russia.

These days, 80 percent of its 20,000 patients a year are heroin users.

Tatyana came to the hospital to break a heroin habit she began six years
earlier, when she was 18. It was cheap and fun at first, and thrilling.
Eventually, she was spending 400 rubles a day on heroin - about one-third of
an average monthly salary in Russia. She stole some of it from her parents;
she wouldn't talk about how she got the rest.

Now, after 42 days of detoxification and short-term rehabilitation, she was
nearing release, nervous, scared and ashamed.

She is also HIV-positive, something she'd just learned.

"There isn't any worse punishment." Tatyana said, eyes filled with pain. And
yet, she added, she took the news calmly. "It was no surprise."

Tatyana wants to find a job now. "I have to fill in my days, in order not to
think."

How did this happen? How did a nearly drug-free society become engulfed in
drugs in such a short time?

Tatyana has her own ideas. "Before, in the Soviet era, there were very rigid
rules people had to follow. ... Then, with this democracy, I believe it took
on a monstrous quality, in which everything is allowed, with no
restrictions. ... It's a deluge."