RUSSIA: DRUGS HIT HARD IN WELL-PLACED CITY

Sasha is a scrawny 15-year-old with big brown eyes and floppy hair. He lives
with his mother and grandmother, gets frustrated with school and wants to be
a carpenter or a car mechanic when he grows up.

He sounds like a normal teenage boy. Except for the fact that he used to buy
half a liter of gasoline a day and inhale the fumes after school.

"I had hallucinations - I saw mice running all around me," Sasha says in a
matter-of-fact tone, as he sits in the teenage boys' ward of Psychiatric
Hospital No. 3, where he has been receiving treatment for substance abuse.
He said he knew the habit could damage his brain, but that didn't stop him.

In the ward with Sasha are 44 other boys, a third of whom are recovering
drug addicts. Often the patients who come to the ward are hooked on even
stronger substances - heroin being the most popular. Many of the boys are
short for their age, and all are thin and pale.

Sasha and the other boys in his ward are among the most hapless victims of
the city's exploding drug problem. Russia's relaxed borders have made St.
Petersburg a major hub in the country's drug trade, serving as both a
lucrative gateway for traffic abroad and a local breeding ground for a new
and vulnerable generation of addicts - some as young as seven years old.

Drugs are smuggled into Russia, mainly from central Asian countries and
Latin America, and then back out through St. Petersburg, which provides
fast, convenient routes to Western Europe by air, sea and rail.

More and more drugs are also staying in the city itself, where heroin
peddlers have quickly learned to hang around schoolyards while police and
doctors struggle to contain the problem with miserly resources.

"St. Petersburg is one of Russia's centers of drug use and one of the
biggest transit points in the Northwest region," said Igor Isaichev, head of
the drug smuggling division of the region's customs service.

A decade ago borders were tightly guarded. But when the Soviet Union
dissolved, so did its iron grip on transit flow, opening wide gateways to
Europe and allowing drug traffickers easy passage.

"There are practically no borders, which may be good for [economic] ties but
creates serious problems for drug control," said Isaichev.

Huge profits can be made from selling these drugs in Russia and the West.
According to Georgy Zazulin, head of the Illegal Drugs Trade Department of
the city police force, a kilo of heroin which costs $5,000 in Tajikistan can
go for $45,000 in St. Petersburg and as much as $300,000 in Finland.

St. Petersburg is, however, more than a useful conduit for drug smugglers.
It is also a well-stocked narcotics center that feeds the city's own growing
demand for drugs.

Isaichev, the customs officer, said the Northwest region has seen a 15
percent rise in the amount of drugs found in the area since last year. The
city's top drugs doctor, Leonid Shpilenya, recently described the situation
as an "epidemic" and said that there would be 10-15 percent more addicts in
the city by the year 2000.

Of the rainbow of drugs that can be found in the city, the main problem is
heroin, because it is cheap, powerful, highly addictive and sold everywhere.
"Heroin has forced out all other drugs," said a senior detective from the
narcotics squad in one city precinct, who did not want to be identified.

The detective said drug dealers often sold heroin and marijuana outside
schools, and adults could get it at markets and metro stations. At markets,
traders from Central Asia often use Russian women to sell drugs since they
are less likely to be suspected by police - after getting them hooked first,
he said.

Heroin costs as little as 50-100 rubles, or about $2.80-$5.70, for one dose
of 0.3 grams.

The abundance of heroin has been a driving force behind the increasing
spread of AIDS in Russia. In November the Health Ministry said 1,800 new HIV
cases had been reported over the last six months. Ninety percent of those
who contracted the virus were intravenous drug users.

Set against the surging drug problem are the city's woefully underfunded law
enforcement bodies. Faced with the multi-million dollar international drug
business, police and customs officers are at something of a disadvantage.

"The fight against drugs is not financed. In the West it is financed. Our
budget has not changed since 1993," said Zazulin.

The senior drugs detective, for instance, shares one car with the four other
investigators. He and his colleagues do not have mobile phones, but radio
field telephones that are "practically useless." He is paid less than $50 a
month, so has to work several nights a week as a security guard.

"We have to be more cunning than in the West," he said. "The most important
thing is your brain."

The law's fight against drugs is complicated further by rampant corruption
within the police force. Off the record, police officers admit that many
fellow officers - one detective's estimate was 30 percent - are corrupt and
that drug dealers have good connections with precinct bosses.

Even Zazulin, who is the city's most senior drugs officer, said the process
of apprehending drug dealers was a potential hotbed of corruption.

"When we arrest a dealer on the street they say to us, here's $10,000, let
us go. They're saying this to our staff who gets $100 a month at most. Even
if our staff is honest there are other opportunities to pay bribes: during
the investigation, at the court," he said.

Like the police, doctors are fighting a losing battle against drugs,
particularly with children.

Drugs specialist Shpilenya has said that children as young as seven are
taking hard drugs, including heroin, cocaine, crack and Ecstasy, though
these are rare cases.

Sergei Golovko, head of the teenage boys' ward at Psychiatric Hospital No.
3, said that it was quite usual for drug dealers to use schoolchildren to
persuade their peers to take heroin.

The go-betweens give other children several free injections of heroin, which
is enough to get them hooked, he said.

Golovko said addiction to hard drugs has escalated dramatically; two or
three years ago children who took heroin were isolated cases.

Dmitry Masakov, a drugs doctor at Crisis Psychological Help for Teen agers,
which offers psychological help for addicted teenagers or children and their
families, sees children as young as three who are addicted to tranquilizers,
glue, paint and gasoline.

He said children often go straight onto heroin, without starting on softer
drugs as many do in the West.

Yakov Gilinsky, a criminologist who heads the Center of Deviantology at the
city's Institute of Sociology, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences,
believes drugs will continue to be attractive to young Russians as long as
their futures are so uncertain.

"It is hard here to fight drugs because of the situation in the country.
There is a very long-lasting social, financial, economic and moral crisis,"
he said.

Checked-by: Don Beck