St. Petersburg Times

July 25, 2000

EDITORIAL

Law Enforces Ignorance of AIDS Risks

LAST week The St. Petersburg Times featured an article that was technically illegal. We apologize for any mayhem this may have caused on city streets this weekend. We were unaware of the illegality of our actions under Article 1 of the Press Law. The Law "forbids the dissemination throughout the mass media ... of information about the means, methods of production, preparation and use of narcotic substances, psychotropic substances, and their components, any kind propaganda about where or how you can use narcotics, or psychotropics ... " - in other words, the less you know the less likely you are to try it.

This is typical of Russia's attitude towards drugs, especially towards those that may in fact contribute to the spread of diseases such as AIDS. For fear of contributing to the proliferation of the practice in question, which is actually responsible for 90 percent of the 50,000 new cases of HIV in Russia, the strong arm of the law forbids us to inject ideas and information into the minds of our readers.

Isn't this the very information people need as a deterrent? It is a shame that sufficient educational programs about the dangers of drug use are not widely available, but it is a greater shame that those media, which have the power to provide that education, are forbidden from doing so by lawmakers embarrassed about the problems their laws are written to cover up.

Open your eyes! Take a look at Kaliningrad, at the Moskovsky Oblast, at the Leningrad Oblast, or at Tolyatti, where the blooming problem is treated like inclement weather. With 10 to 20 new cases per day in some of these places, can people possibly understand the risks of what they are doing?

In Chelyabinsk, City Hall and several NGOs have made an effort to disseminate information on AIDS and drug use. It is graphic, but the mayor will hardly be hauled off to jail if his own son is, as he is reported to be, an addict.

Whether it takes a worried mayor sitting on pins and those things we can't mention, or a line of bereaved mothers, there must be a dialog, and ideas must be spread instead of stifled by paranoid bureaucrats.

From Vladivostok to Moscow, stifling information about this budding epidemic is what bureaucrats do best. Remember how indifferent the government acted when its first AIDS case was registered in 1987? How about St. Petersburg's policy of treating for free only those infected during hospital stays? Or the reaction to Kaliningrad's explosion when it began in the late 1990s?

Describing the cause of most of these people's sufferings is a crime, but isn't the real crime not letting children who haven't yet been infected know what to look out for?