BRAIN SURGEON CUTS AWAY HEROIN SLAVERY

THE famous St Petersburg brain surgeon, Svyatoslav Medvedev, has found a
cure for drug addiction and claims a 70 to 80 per cent success rate.
However, the process involves inserting a needle into the brain and
removing what Dr Medvedev believes to be the offending tissue.

Dr Medvedev says the success of his technique lies in the fact that his
operation treats the addict's psychological addiction while other methods
concentrate first and foremost on the physical side of the illness. Of the
hundred or so heroin addicts who have undergone Dr Medvedev's revolutionary
procedure over the past two years, most have found themselves suddenly free
from a compulsion that had thus far blighted their lives.

"This is not a new operation," says Dr Medvedev of the St Petersburg
Institute for the Human Brain. "The procedure has been commonplace for more
than 30 years. It is just that we have renamed the disease." The operation,
according to Dr Medvedev, has long been performed worldwide to treat
various obsessive-compulsive disorders and particularly phantom pain
syndrome, through which Dr Medvedev drew the inspiration for his addiction
cure. Many sufferers of phantom pain syndrome endured such agony in their
absent limb that they had become morphine addicts in their efforts to
relieve their symptoms.

After he had introduced a thin needle into the brain of these patients with
the use of only a local anaesthetic, the sufferers found that, not only had
their phantom pain disappeared, but their morphine addiction had been
alleviated as well. This phenomenon provided Dr Medvedev with the idea for
his cure. "You see, addiction is a kind of obsession and this process does
not change any part of the personality. We know how to reach the structures
we need to eliminate without damaging any other parts of the brain," he says.

Dr Medvedev is from a long line of physicians. His great-
great-grandfather, doctor to both Lenin and Stalin, disappeared without
trace in 1927, and his mother, Natalya Bekhtireva, is a revered
neuro-physiologist.

Dr Medvedev does not believe that his technique will ever become
widespread, for although he thinks it could be used to treat addiction to
gambling, over-eating or alcohol, he does not believe it should be. "Of
course, any interventive surgery is dangerous. In Czechoslovakia in the
1950s two surgeons were given licence to perform this type of surgery on
dangerous criminals and psychopaths. Although the technique was successful,
there was obviously a grave moral question.

"This surgery is a last resort for my addicts. Heroin can kill you in four
years. My patients have almost no functioning liver and they all suffer
from hepatitis B and C. The operation is a matter of life and death." Dr
Medvedev emphasises that, although he has discovered a cure for

addiction, he believes it should only be used in extreme cases. "We are not
treating heroin dependency. We are treating imminent death," he says.

Despite the obvious advantages of the treatment, there are still those who
pour scorn on his institute. Aleksandr Andrianov, head of the Association
for the Fight Against Drug Addiction and the Drug Business, says: "If you
want to cut off a corn, there is no reason to remove your whole leg. The
Ministry of Health has certainly not given its permission for this kind of
operation to be performed."

But Russia, which has been flooded with heroin since the collapse of the
Soviet Union - 390kg (about 858lb) of the drug and 893kg (1964lb) of
unprocessed opium were seized en route to Russia from Turkmenistan alone in
1998 - is in dire need of a cure of some kind.

A report published last year by London's International Institute for
Strategic Studies said: "A very real danger exists that one or more of the
Central Asian states will become 'narcocracies' similar to Burma and
Colombia." It added that Kyrgyzstan alone was exporting more narcotics by
1995 than Burma or Thailand.

Yevgeni Tolkachev, of Moscow's 17th Narcological Hospital, barely has room
for his 500 patients who stay about 21 days each. All of them are heroin
addicts and he admits that his recidivists are many.

It is hospitals like this that might benefit if Dr Medvedev's methods were
to become more widely used. Although he believes in his treatment programme
of anti-psychotics coupled with psychiatric help, he thinks it is hard for
the users, who are getting progressively younger, to extricate themselves
from a drug-using lifestyle.

With heroin currently priced at 600 roubles (UKP20) a gram, this can be a
difficult lifestyle to maintain.

"None of them work. The boys steal and the women often sell themselves," he
says. Although many methods of treatment have been tried in Russia,
including a recent effort on the part of Aleksei Suvernev, a Siberian
doctor, to heat patients' bodies to the point of hyperthermia in the belief
that this removes the physical dependence on drugs, Mr Andrianov believes
that addicts should be left to die.

"If they want to stop, they will. There is nothing you can do to help them.
There are 1,000 hospital places for addicts in Moscow and there's never a
free bed. We don't have the right to refuse them, but they always start
again."