Just as Vladimir Putin launched his war in Ukraine,
he went on Russian TV to make a rambling speech
accusing the Ukrainian government of being drug addicts.
I appeal to the servicemen of the armed forces of Ukraine.
Take power into your own hands
instead of this gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis
who settled in Kyiv.
This was a bit off the wall, even for Putin.
The Ukrainian political class has been accused of many things,
but regularly getting high isn’t usually one of them.
But this is indicative of a wider pattern
in Russian policy and society,
whereby people who use drugs are stigmatized, brutalized,
and treated as virtually subhuman.
This is how, for decades,
the Russian government has been waging a brutal
and failing war on drugs against its own people,
with disastrous results
not just in Russia but across the globe.
[THE WAR ON DRUGS SHOW]
[RUSSIA’S DRUG WARS]
Russia has some of the harshest drug enforcement in the world.
Sixty-three percent of inmates in Russian prisons
are there for drug offenses.
Police regularly beat and torture users.
And vigilante groups who target addicts and dealers
with the most extreme violence
are tolerated or even encouraged.
Several brutal incidents of this state-sanctioned violence
have been filmed and gone viral over the past few years.
Here is a drug dealer.
We can meet you...
and we will “cure” you.
Drug addicts, you are also welcome!
That was a suspected dealer
and is thought to have been beaten to death.
No trial, no appeal,
just a war on drugs death squad.
The Russian drug policy
is one of the harshest drug policies in the world.
The idea was: OK, if you stop drugs,
you're welcome back to the society.
But if you don't stop using drugs, you are going to get HIV.
You're not going to get any harm reduction.
You’re going to get to prison, contract tuberculosis, and die soon.
They’re ready to eradicate several millions of their own people.
Medications like methadone and buprenorphine,
which are internationally recognized as
the gold standard of opioid addiction treatment
and classified as essential medicines by the World Health Organization,
are completely banned in Russia.
Instead, users are simply forced to go cold turkey.
The center, one of its kind in Russia,
forces addicts to go cold turkey.
For one month, these young women will be locked in their rooms.
Or get sent to bizarre Christian rehab centers.
Alexi is the pastor of an independent church
that reforms heroin and krokodil addicts.
The Devil’s agenda is to destroy people.
The method he uses could be anything,
be it atheism or drugs.
In Russia, there’s almost zero official provision
of even the most basic harm reduction measures,
like needle exchange programs.
Even other countries with harsh enforcement regimes,
like China or Iran,
practice some forms of harm reduction.
Russia is almost completely unique
in its total ban of these life-saving approaches.
One of the key questions in all of this is simply
do these harsh measures actually work?
And the answer to that question is very clearly no, they do not.
Russia has an estimated 1.8 million injecting drug users,
one of the highest in the world.
A further 7.5 million people regularly use illicit drugs,
about 6 percent of the entire population.
Which shows there are plenty of people
who aren’t exactly being scared sober.
Following the classic pattern of the war on drugs across the world,
harsh enforcement didn’t make people use less drugs.
It just made them use more dangerous drugs.
In the mid 2000s, a horrifying new substance emerged
almost unique to the Russian drug scene—krokodil.
What’s this?
Sasha.
-What is it? -Tropicamide.
What is tropicamide?
Tropicamide is eye drops.
Sasha explained that the eye drops were one of the main ingredients
of a new drug called krokodil, a kind of moonshine heroin.
Krokodil is so-called because it turns the user’s skin scaly
and eats them from the inside out.
Krokodil is genuinely horrific.
It’s made from a concoction of easily available ingredients,
it’s cheaper than heroin,
and from around 2010,
it tore through the Russian drug-using community.
This is Sergei.
We met him begging outside on the street,
and he said most of the people he knew
had been affected by heroin and krokodil.
Later that night, Sergei took us on a tour of local pharmacies
to show us how easy it is to pick up the ingredients for krokodil.
Caffetin, formic acid, tropicamide.
Then you add petrol
and cook the drug.
You boil it down, roast it,
then put what you got into the syringe
and inject.
And as if thousands of people
injecting themselves with homemade toxic sludge isn’t bad enough,
the wider effects of Russian drug policy only get worse.
Harm reduction programs in Russia are not strictly prohibited.
However, the uncertainty of criminal and administrative laws
put them into the gray area
which prevents the regional governments from funding them.
HIV, hepatitis, and other diseases have spread to the point
that one in three injecting drug users in Russia
are HIV-positive.
As tragic and brutal as their government’s attitudes are
for the Russian people themselves,
these policies also have effects across the world.
Russia has woven international drug enforcement into its foreign policy
and is very often the key country
to oppose and block international reform.
Russia has often been an obstacle in progressing the world
towards better policies when it comes to the UN.
Very often, those concerns have nothing to do with science,
have nothing to do with human rights standards.
So why have Russian authorities adopted such extreme approaches?
Part of an answer might be that instead of looking at
the very clear evidence that prohibition has utterly failed,
Russian policymakers have adopted a conspiracist worldview
in which the drugs flooding into the country,
particularly heroin from Afghanistan,
are part of a giant international plot.
Sasha explained to us that there might be more to the drug trade
than just making money.
My opinion is that bringing in heroin to Russia
is one of the ways of degenerating the nation.
The fact that it’s so simple to load the country with heroin
indicates to me that there’s some kind of agenda
to degenerate the Russian nation by extremist countries.
This is pretty wild,
as it was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
that first kickstarted heroin production there.
But also the newest wave of drugs surging in popularity in Russia
aren’t opioids from Afghanistan at all
but new synthetic drugs largely cooked up in labs in China.
The main drug of choice in Russia now
is the group of cathinones like alpha-PVP, for example.
The widespread phenomenon now
is the internet-based illicit drug market.
Police cannot do much because much of it is concealed.
It’s in the dark web.
The only reaction from police now is basically chasing drug users.
But many observers have suggested there may be another reason
why Russian elites are so keen to keep fighting the war on drugs:
that they profit from it.
The links between aspects of organized crime, corruption,
and the Russian political class are well known.
And while this is, of course, murky territory,
there have been several serious allegations that politicians,
diplomats, and law enforcement officers
are themselves involved in high-level trafficking.
This is Viktor Ivanov, a close ally of President Putin
and formerly head of the FSKN,
Russia’s equivalent of the DEA.
He’s been deeply linked to organized crime groups
operating between St. Petersburg and Spain.
In 2010, Spanish authorities accused the Putin regime
of operating a virtual mafia state.
In 2016, the FSKN itself was entirely disbanded
in a sea of corruption allegations.
Meanwhile, everyone from cops on the street
to Russian ambassadors
have been accused of profiting from the drugs trade.
There was a case where the Russian embassy in Argentina
was engaged in trafficking more than 400 kilos of cocaine.
Even the aircraft of
the State Security Council of the Russian Federation
was engaged into this special operation
to take that cocaine back to Russia.
Russia is a case study in how the war on drugs
fails to decrease problematic drug use
or keep people safe
but massively increases crime, misery, and corruption.
The war on drugs has always really been a war on people.
And for the Russian people,
the tragedy is that their government has declared war on them
in the most vicious, brutal, and needless ways.
We’d like to congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs.