RUSSIA STRUGGLING TO COPE WITH DRUGS

Nation In Throes Of Epidemic As Heroin, Cocaine Flood In

MOSCOW -- She was just a kid when the whole drug thing hit. She's still just
a kid, actually, 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 high-rise apartment
buildings. Being young and smart and disaffected, she thought it was cool --
"simply interesting" -- to do drugs.

She did pot at 14, hallucinogens at 15 and heroin at 17.

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 happens to be the drug of choice at the moment. With little drug
education, and a government that doesn't differentiate among types of drugs,
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 the supply is relatively abundant and cheap.

As a result, a country that had little experience with drugs during much of
the Soviet era is battling to cope with something most Western countries
have been dealing with for decades.

Poorly paid border guards and police are easily bribed by drug dealers.
Long-term drug treatment is mostly unheard of, except in expensive private
clinics available only to a few rich. Short-term treatment is available, but
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 witnessed the vanguard of the Russian drug problem as
the country's first young rock stars followed in the path of their Western
idols.

Later, he would get to know young rockers who were fast becoming national
stars, and fast slipping into serious drug use.

Even then, drug use in Russia was a strictly fringe phenomenon. Russians
were drinkers, not drug users. But in the past decade, that has begun to
change among the young -- especially 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, according to Viktor
Yaponchik, deputy director of the Interior Department's anti-drug program.
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 one such neighborhood.

"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 that her last name not be published.

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

A gloomy complex of tall, gritty brick buildings, the hospital has 2,900
beds and treats 20,000 patients a year for drug and alcohol abuse. These
days, 80 percent of its patients 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. She was nervous and scared and ashamed.

She was 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."