DRUGS PUSH SCARRED LAND TO THE BRINK

Moldova was crippled by poverty after throwing off its Soviet chains.
Now a new epidemic is plunging its people into ruin.

The orgy has lasted 10 days. Fourteen gaunt addicts, cramped together
in a bare flat in the shattered ruins of a Soviet tower block,
repeatedly inject themselves with the drug that they have distilled
over candles from cough mixture, aspirin and vinegar. The hits are
sharp, highly addictive and propel everyone into a sexual frenzy. The
effects are so short-lived, everyone has to inject at 40-minute
intervals - more than 30 times a day. Veins quickly get torn and they
have to inject into every accessible blood vessel in the body - in
the arms, legs, neck, genitals.

A government film, shot secretly from a cupboard, shows that during
the 10 days of the orgy the addicts get no sleep and eat little. They
collapse for a week and the cycle starts again.

With shared needles and no condoms, almost all ephedrone addicts are
HIV-positive. But it doesn't matter to them. The drug is so harsh on
the body that addicts invariably die within three years as their
organs simply collapse.

The ephedrone epidemic started sweeping Moldova, Europe's most
shattered nation, five years ago, offering the only escape for a
people who have given up hope.

Since their first free elections in December 1991, many have seen
their standard of living slip back to that of the Middle Ages.

In Moldova's second largest city, Balti, one in 10 are now injecting
drug users, with many of the rest on softer drugs. Still under
communist control, Balti used to make hi-tech weapons for the Soviet
army but has now turned into a city of ghosts.

Sitting huddled in her empty flat in a crumbling block filled with
human faeces, Tatiana, 33, knows she has about a year left to live.
She was introduced to ephedrone two years ago by her brother-in-law
and has been injecting it ever since.

Her brother and sister are also addicts; all their seven severely
underdeveloped children are addicted to glue. She gets no money from
the state and has sold her fridge, cooker, television, carpet, lights
and even the glass in the door to buy drugs.

She has no gas, electricity or water and sits all day on a bench with
just a few rotting cabbages on the floor, her only decoration a
crucifix. At lunchtime, she stares blankly at a bowl of cold
porridge, and decides to save it for dinner, when she will have to
eat in the dark.

'The ephedrone means there is no pain, then you feel active and sexy.
But it destroys the body in a very short period. Even your speech
suffers,' she said.

Her 14-year-old son, Igor, had been imprisoned that morning - she
didn't know why - and her 15-year-old daughter, Ilyana, was in tears.
She hadn't managed to get her fix of glue that afternoon.

Ilyana has a sideline as a prostitute to make money for drugs and
food. Prostitution has become so normal among young women, there is
no longer any stigma - it is just part of growing up.

'Prostitution is now socially acceptable,' said Gabriella Ionaschcu,
head of the United Nations' Aids programme (Unaids) in Moldova.
'People taking ephedrone don't have long to live, but they don't care
- - they are only interested in taking the drug and getting maximum
pleasure.'

Unaids has projects to discourage people from sharing needles and to
encourage them to use condoms, but prostitution and drug use are so
rampant that Moldova could end up with African levels of HIV within a
decade.

=46or many, lethal drugs are a way out of one of the worst social and
economic collapses the world has seen. Since independence from the
Soviet Union in 1991, Moldova's economy has shrunk by almost 70 per
cent, making it by far the poorest nation in Europe, with an average
income of =A3180 a year. Only in the capital, Chisinau, are there any
signs of prosperity, among the gangster capitalists who have
flourished on smuggling, corruption and the sale of state assets.

In the village of Mereni, an hour's drive from Chisinau, most of the
population have slid back into pre-industrial times. There are no
longer any cars, only donkeys and carts trundling around.

Jurig Prisagaru, 33, used to work as a truck driver when Moldova was
part of the Soviet Union but lost his job, then broke his arm, and
had to give up one by one the benefits of the twentieth century. He
can no longer afford gas, electricity or to buy food from others. He
lives in a scruffy mud-and-brick hut with his wife, Lyumila, and
their four children.

Their water is drawn from a well and heated by wood stolen from the
forest and vegetables grown on the scrap of land around them. They
haven't eaten meat, fish or sugar for six months. Their only income
is the =A33 a month they get from the government - about =A335 a year for
a family of six.

'It was much better in Soviet times - we had factories, machine parts
and tractors for the fields,' he mourned. 'Now we have nothing. I've
had to take two of my children out of school because I can't afford
the books.'

The UN Development Programme reckons that in this once industrialised
country two-thirds of the rural economy is now based on subsistence
and barter. Moldovans are worried about unemployment, failing health
and rampant crime, but opinion polls show that their biggest fear is
simply famine.

They are also losing their strongest asset, their high levels of
education and culture. Since 1991, illiteracy among rural children
has risen by 30 per cent. Even the rural rich are sliding back to the
Middle Ages. Prisagaru's neighbours, Lydia and Petru Ustica,
considered themselves well-off in Soviet times, with good jobs and a
large house. Now his job as a watchman brings in just =A38 a month to
support them and their five children, and they have to grow their
food. They can not pay their gas bill of =A350 and are preparing to
manage without electricity.

But there are lengths to which Petru Ustica will not go: unlike
others in the village, he is not prepared to sell one of his kidneys
for a transplant operation in the West. 'I could get $4,500 but I
will never sell my health,' he said. Ustica would like to go abroad
but says: 'I don't even have the money to move.'

A quarter of the population of four and a half million are working
abroad, most of them women, almost all of them illegally. What
remains of the economy has become dependent on the =A3150 million they
send back each year.

But often work overseas leads to prison rather than salvation.
Valentina, a pretty 23-year-old, last year allowed her neighbour to
arrange a marriage to an Italian so she could find work in Italy. At
night, chased by border guards, she crossed a river into Romania,
where she was due to meet her future husband. The men who greeted her
kept her in a mountain hut for two weeks, and she discovered she had
been sold into sexual slavery.

She was forced to work as a prostitute in nightclubs in Bosnia and
Macedonia. In the first nightclub, Expresso, there were 32 girls,
mostly Moldovan, who had also been trafficked, most of them
repeatedly beaten.

Valentina managed to phone her mother back in Moldova, who could not
afford to come out and rescue her. Eventually, her mother contacted
the Moldovan Centre for the Prevention of Trafficking in Women, which
persuaded Interpol to get her out.

The centre, which is investigating 600 cases of trafficking, has just
launched a public awareness campaign with the slogan 'Don't let
yourself be trafficked'.

Ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Europe remains
divided between East and West - not by politics but by poverty.