Boston Globe

27 February 1999

Russia faces a new cold war - soaring drug use 3 million addicts, many of them youths, caught in a $2b industry

By David Filipov

ST. PETERSBURG - From her seat in the corner of the bar, Kseniya scans the clients, looking for the trick she'll need to score within a few hours if she's to pay for her next hit of heroin. Actually, there is no ''if.'' She has to score, so she will.

It's a slow night at the 777 Bar, a dimly lit cellar dive where Kseniya and her teenage friends take a break from the subzero cold. It's a 10-minute walk from the grandeur of the museums and theaters that make St. Petersburg one of the world's cultural capitals. They might as well be on another planet.

''Here, I'm a star,'' Kseniya says in her dreamy drawl.

And a statistic. Kseniya is one of an estimated 3 million Russian drug addicts, many of them young people from middle-class families like her own.

That figure represents an astonishing leap since the early '90s, when addicts numbered in the thousands. Today, Kseniya is part of an illegal narcotics trade that, according to Russia's Interior Ministry, has burgeoned into a $2 billion annual industry.

The clock is ticking for her. Russian heroin addicts have a four-year life expectancy from the moment they get hooked, according to health officials. That span must be lower for $2-an-hour prostitutes. Not long ago, Kseniya stabbed a man who tried to rape her.

By all rights, 20-year-old Kseniya should be dead. But she is savvy. She and her friends know not to call an ambulance when someone overdoses, because the drivers let junkies die. She has seen it happen.

They know how to pull each other back from an overdose. She knows how to shoot up in her groin to keep her arms and legs unmarked. She knows in which dark passageways and abandoned apartments to hide. She knows she has to kick this habit and fly away.

''I wanna go to Ukraine,'' Kseniya says, distantly. ''I got a grandmother there. I'm gonna live in the village and milk cows.''

Her attention returns to the bar. There are a couple of stoners gyrating and screaming along with music by Courtney Love: ''Go on, take everything, take everything.'' There is her 18-year-old brother, Igor, who got her hooked on heroin last year and steals from their mother to pay for his habit. There is Igor's businessman friend. And the big cop playing the slot machine, within eavesdropping range.

''`Menty' are such idiots,'' says Kseniya, using the Russian slang for cops. She knows him. She knows all the cops, prostitutes, and drug dealers who work this neighborhood.

Sometimes the police sell her heroin they have just shaken down from addict on the street. Sometimes they help find her clients to help pay for her habit. Sometimes they make her give them for free what she sells. Recently one fined her 10 rubles, the equivalent of 50 cents, for using profane language.

''Can you believe that? Ten rubles for calling a ment a jackass,'' Kseniya says, her voice rising as the music stops. The cop looks over. Time to leave.

''We are barely holding it back''

In a basement not far away, Misha huddles in his coat against the chill. His ''office'' - a small underground dugout with cracked wallpaper - is beneath the Maltsev Market, center of the local drug trade. Misha, who asked that his real name not be used, is an undercover police officer, part of a special task force St. Petersburg police have set up to fight the drug trade.

Misha sneers at the word ''fight.'' He says, ''We are barely holding it back.''

Last year, the big drug was an opium brew called ''poppy straw.'' Then Russia's economy collapsed, and, coincidentally, the heroin supply from Central Asia exploded. Crime groups based in Tajikistan bring the heroin here, where a local gang handles sales at the market. The street price of a ''check,'' a small foil wrapper half the size of a stick of gum, fell from over $6 to 80 cents.

Misha displays a check. Dealers can conceal it easily and get rid of it fast. Users can swallow it. Unlike poppy straw, which needs to be cooked, heroin is easy to use.

Misha has no idea how many addicts roam the market, but he knows there are a lot. ''They're usually teenagers. They come from good families, but they have nothing to do,'' he said. ''They hit the streets, someone in a group tries it. Then they all try it, then you have a group of new addicts. It's a terrible situation.''

Russia has enlisted pop celebrities for an American-style public relations campaign that includes television ads and talk shows dedicated to the horrors of drug addiction. But Russia's financially strapped health-care system has no money for serious rehabilitation programs.

A tough anti-drug law passed last year gives police the right to stop and search people who look as if they are using drugs. According to government figures, more than 250,000 people were arrested in 1998 on drug charges, up from 185,000 the year before.

This law has earned the wrath of human rights activists, who say it targets users rather than dealers and does not get to the root of the problem. Misha agrees.

''Kids do drugs even though they know they're going to jail,'' he says. ''We have dealers who get out and go right back to work. As long as there's demand, we won't stop this. This is a problem with our society. Young people's lives have no structure, no reason to believe, no ideals.''

One teenager, 17-year-old Igor, remembers when he got hooked. It was in the fourth grade, and the substance was glue.

''Since then I've guzzled gasoline, eaten mushrooms, swallowed speed, gulped Valium, smoked hashish, shot poppy straw, and now heroin,'' Igor says in a raspy monotone at a nameless cafe near the Maltsev Market. Today, he sells checks and shoots up, often 20 times a day.

Igor walks to the Maltsev Market, a short walk from Nevsky Prospekt, the elegant thoroughfare laid out by Peter the Great. Business is brisk. A man with alert eyes and a purposeful gait, known here as ''Squash,'' darts over to a vegetable vendor and touches his hand. Squash, a balding man of about 35 in a dark leather jacket, strides to the entrance of the market, where a throng of teenagers waits in watch caps and parkas. Most are pale with dark circles under their eyes.

Squash walks up to one youth, passes on the tiny check, and moves on. No money changes hands. That is done elsewhere, when there are no drugs around. In a minute, Squash has hit them all. Then two muscular security guards with ''Special Forces'' stitched into their camouflage jackets chase the kids away.

''We keep this place clean of unwanted elements,'' one of them says, winking.

The police - the ones who are trying to stop it - know all about this system. ''Misha'' knows that he could never get close enough to Squash to make an arrest in the few moments he actually carries the heroin. The dealers have too many lookouts who can identify Misha. And there are so many Squashes. ''We arrest a drug dealer, and there are 20 in line to take his place,'' says Misha.

The number of cases of HIV doubled in 1998 to 10,483, Vadim Pokrovsky, head of the Russian Center for AIDS Prevention, told the Interfax news agency this week. Russia's health minister, Vladimir Starodubov, said last fall that 90 percent of the country's new cases of HIV were needle users.

Over the protest of some residents, St. Petersburg Governor Vladimir Yakovlev has supported a program that distributes clean needles to drug users to prevent the spread of disease.

''Some people are against us''

A block away from the Maltsev Market, psychologist Olga Timofeyeva hands out needles and does blood tests in a freezing bus. She has registered 7,000 drug users, about seven people each day.

''Most of the kids tell me, `If I had something to do, I wouldn't have started taken drugs,''' says Timofyeva, 29. ''A lot of them come from well-off families. Often, when they come on the bus, you can't tell they are addicts ...''

Her voice trails off. Timofeyeva's coworkers nervously check to see that her visitors are not carrying drugs. Some local police have tried to close the bus down, saying it is a den of drug users. ''Some people are against us,'' Timofeyeva says.

A short walk away, Kseniya and her friends are back on the street, stomping their feet in the cold.