February 6, 1992

Russians Gird For Proliferation Of Illegal Drugs

Asian Republic Will Legalize Cultivation Of Opium Poppies

By Juan O. Tamayo

Russian drug enforcement authorities are battling a massive increase in illegal drug trafficking, unleashed by the disintegration of the former Soviet Union into smaller and more corruption-prone republics. The Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan has announced plans to lift a 20-year-old ban on growing opium poppies, used seek the economic advantages. It will be disastrous," said Col. Alexander Sergeyev, 49, head of the Drug Enforcement Bureau at the former Soviet Interior Ministry. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, already training drug officials, may soon open a full-time office in Moscow to monitor the jump in production of poppies, hashish and even "designer drugs." Much of the increased production might find its way to Western Europe or the United States, because local consumption is being held down by a searing domestic economic crisis, Russian and Western officials said. Illegal plantings of opium poppies in Central Asia, heart of the Soviet drug trade, almost tripled from the 1990 harves

t season to the 1991 season, Deputy Soviet Interior Minister Nikolay Osipov announced in October. That was before the Soviet Union shattered in December into 11 republics that exercise local law enforcement control. "With the dismantling of the U.S.S.R., without a coordinating center to link the republics . . . our problems will be further aggravated," said Sergeyev, who expects to become head of the Russian Interior Ministry's drug enforcement department when it's officially established next month. A map in his office shows the main growing areas in five small republics north of Afghanistan and Iran -- Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan -- largely populated by descendants of Turkic-speaking tribes with long traditions of poppy and hashish cultivation. "Imports" also arrive from war-ravaged Afghanistan, and the drugs are transported west to the big urban centers in European Russia. Exports leave through Baltic seaports and land borders with Western Europe. St. Petersburg, i

n western Russia, is the center of production of synthetic "designer drugs" such as Fentanyl, also known as "angel dust." Six laboratories have been raided there since 1987, Sergeyev said. The former Soviet Union produced an estimated 120 to 130 tons of illegal drugs per year in the mid-1980s, of which only about 20 percent were intercepted by authorities, Sergeyev said. Most of the drugs were consumed by Soviet citizens, he added. A government survey in 1989 estimated there were 1.5 million drug abusers in the union, only 1 percent of them hard- core heroin addicts. With central authority vanished, however, Sergeyev expects that production will go even higher, law enforcement will become lax, corruption will grow, international borders will become more porous, and exports will rise. Already on the table is the question of who will pay for satellite monitoring of poppy cultivation areas, he said. The Central Asian republics cannot afford the costs, and Russia is richer but has no growing areas. Kyrgyzsta

n's plan to lift the ban on poppies is particularly worrisome, Sergeyev said, because up to 40 percent of the crop disappeared into criminal hands when growing poppies was legal in the 1960s. Facing critical economic hardships as the former Soviet Union moves from communism to a free-market system, many of the republics also have been cutting back on public employees, including drug enforcement agents. Police narcotics bureaus were shut down in 39 Soviet cities last year because of budget constraints. Further personnel cutbacks have been impossible to monitor because of the union's collapse. Amid such economic chaos, the lure of payoffs from drug traffickers will prove almost impossible for police to resist, said Sergeyev's deputy, Sergei Advinko, 36, an ethnic Russian born in Kyrgyzstan. "My friends there tell me it's just getting terrible," said Advinko, who attended a DEA training course in Pennsylvania last year. Added Sergeyev: "Even the most stupid officer can find the path to corruption." Ironic

ally, one factor that may help to dampen the drug trade is the dreadful condition of the domestic transportation system, hit by fuel, truck and railroad shortages and corrupt highway police who "tax" passing cargo. "Even nonillegal goods are hard to deliver. I just can't see it being profitable to ship more drugs, because there are too many people to pay off," said a Western European diplomat based in Moscow. U.S. officials are nevertheless seriously concerned by Russia's potential for becoming a much more important drug exporter, and Washington has asked the embassy in Moscow to step up its reporting on the subject. DEA is considering assigning one of its agents to the embassy, Sergeyev said. "Establishing a DEA agent in Moscow will benefit both sides," he added. DEA previously refrained from opening a Moscow office because it would have required contacts with the KGB, the unsavory security agency that handled major drug-trafficking investigations through the 1980s. But Sergeyev had only praise for th

e DEA and noted that one of his department's first international cooperation agreements was signed with the U.S. agency in January 1990. Several Russian officials have attended DEA courses in the United States, and the agency sponsored a two-week seminar in Moscow in October for some 30 mid-level narcotics officers from 11 former Soviet republics. Among the topics were aerial surveillance and defoliation, infiltrating drug trafficking rings, buy-and-bust techniques and chemical analysis of drugs. "Our best foreign contacts are with the DEA," Sergeyev boasted. "Your country has very deep and great experience with drugs."