Yuri Frolov, 24, started using heroin when he was 16 and living in the city of Kostroma, north of Moscow.
Kostroma isn’t known for heroin. The city of almost 300,000 is on Russia’s Golden Ring, a collection of picturesque cities northeast of Moscow visited by tourists for their typical Russian architecture and onion-shaped church domes.
I met Frolov in May at a drug rehabilitation center in the countryside in southern Russia, near the city of Stavropol. The center is austere. There is no running water and residents have to use outhouses. It’s part work camp, part monastery. The ascetic lifestyle and fresh air are thought to help addicts give up their dependencies. But this bucolic patch of land in the rolling hills of the northern Caucasus comes as a shock for many of the young addicts, who are used to cell phones and urban apartment blocks.
Before he came to the center, Frolov had never worked with livestock. Here he is in charge of collecting water from a nearby reservoir via horse-drawn carriage. In his free time he works with the center’s horses in a sprawling field.
Frolov had been clean for five months when we met. He is broad-shouldered and tall. But there is something delicate about his long face and green eyes. “There was a Gypsy village only three miles from the town I’m from. You’d go there. There’d be cops standing outside. You’d pay them 100 rubles ($3.60) to get in and 50 rubles to get out. The gypsies would yell at you, ‘Buy from me. I’ve got the best stuff.’ You didn’t need to look or anything. There was good quality heroin everywhere.”
Since 2001, the year American and Canadian troops entered Afghanistan, heroin production has reached record levels. And a significant amount of that heroin is ending up here, in Russia. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, it is the world’s largest national market for heroin, consuming about 20 percent of all the heroin trafficked from Afghanistan annually.
There are at least 1.5 million heroin users in Russia. It’s estimated that every day 80 people die from heroin addiction.
At a press conference in May, the head of Russia’s anti-drug agency, Viktor Ivanov, told reporters that among Russia’s most important goals is the liquidation of global drug crimes at the highest levels. It’s no secret that he was referring to Afghan heroin. A map detailing the global heroin trade from Afghanistan to the world was projected on a screen behind him.
“A million people have died globally from Afghan heroin over the past 10 years,” the stern-faced, former KGB officer said.
According to Russia’s Federal Drug Control Services (FSKN), the FSKN and the U.S. military have carried out five joint operations in Afghanistan to destroy drug labs. Russia’s involvement raised the ire of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, as any presence of Russian forces remains a sensitive issue for Afghanis who remember the war with the Soviets.
Despite its focus on the issue, Russia can’t seem to stop the flow of cheap heroin across its borders from the central Asian countries of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, travel from these former Soviet Republics into Russia has remained visa-free. It hasn’t helped that Russian border guards were removed from Tajikistan — which shares an 835-mile border with Afghanistan — in the summer of 2005. Government corruption has also fueled heroin traffic across central Asia and into Russia.
That explains why heroin is still ending up in the veins of young people like Frolov and another addict at the rehab center, Alexei Vanchikov.
“I can count the people who I started using drugs with who are still alive on one hand,” Vanchikov said. He has lived for five years with HIV and refuses to take medication.
With the government unable — or unwilling — to address a problem as serious as heroin addiction, to many there is only one solution left: dealing with it on their own.
But Novopashin said neither drug addicts nor small-time dealers are to blame:
“We should blame the people who didn’t give them a good reason to live, who didn’t give them a sense of purpose, a sense of patriotism, a sense of national identity. Then we should blame the people who made all this possible — you think heroin just falls out of the sky!?” The only way to stop it is to put a stop to opium production in Afghanistan.”
Russia’s tiniest drug capital
A few hours from Moscow by train is the town of Kimry. It was once a town of shoemakers. In the Soviet Union, residents worked in local shoe and textile factories. But in 2001, it was flooded with heroin. By 2004 the problem was impossible to ignore.
“We had around 300 drug dealers and 311 students in the city,” he said, almost in a whisper. “There were needles everywhere. From this house where we are right now, they sold drugs 200 meters (218 yards) that way, 300 meters in that direction they were selling heroin, and over there too.”
Kimry became known as Russia’s tiniest drug capital. According to Lazerov, the local drug mafia was protected by the local prosecutor at the time. A kilo, or two pounds, of heroin was sold every day in Kimry. According to a 2004 news report on Russian state TV, nearly one in five residents in this city of 50,000 was addicted to drugs. Still, in the area near the train station where heroin was once sold openly they, found ample evidence of recent heroin use: Needles littered the dirt road and local residents told us that drugs are still sold there.
“All of the people I know who are around my age shoot up heroin,” he said. “As for the older guys I started shooting up with, there are only two or three left. And they have HIV and they might already be dead. If you go to the cemetery in Kimry you’ll notice that there aren’t very many old people — it’s all kids.”
This story never ends, for it is just a matter of time.
