The analysis of recent publications in electronic and printed Mass-Media leads to the obvious conclusion: the tendency to make more severe the legislative norms in terms of punishments for the illicit dealing with drugs, including drug-abuse, established itself firmly. In contrast with previous years, when this point of view had been strongly promoted and supported by the governmental officials and authorities from law-enforcement structures mainly (Ministry of Interior, Drug Control Committee), today the burning necessity to take the severe legal measures is strongly advocated by the representatives of the health care system, and this is a worrisome sign.
Making his comments about HIV-infection spreading in the country, Gennady Onischenko, the Senior State Sanitary Inspector of Russian Federation said:
"I participated on the Session of the State Council on Drug Control Board. And I believe that this problem must be solved not by medical, but by punitive structures. I am strongly convinced that they are capable to find a solution.
Thefactthatinpresenceof 2 millionsofdrug-abusersexistinginthecountryand rising number of HIV-infected among them we do not take severe measures to combat this evil - including the death penalty restoration - has no excuses. Aperson condemned others to die, not accidentally, but intentionally, - he is a serial murder.AndIwasnotalonetoaloudthisconclusionontheSession." (Almanac "Community and Health" N 8-9, 2004, page 66).
The intensive pressing on public opinion with active exploiting the threats of HIV-infection resulted in roll back from started to appear but not deeply rooted in society principles of human rights and personal freedom, respect of humanistic ideas, towards the more familiar and understandable "strong hand" approach - the intention to solve the problem by means of penalty measures, with law-enforcement structures solely. In this situation the "community demanded" total roll back from the principles of "Harm Reduction" (partially this process already started some time ago), declaring its ideas to be "harmful and unnatural for the national mentality" and pushing forward the reactionary legislative norms on narcotics and HIV/AIDS seems to become of highest probability. More over, according to Mass-Media, the process of pushing through the Parliament the correspondent criminal code changes is already in the progress.
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Kyrgyzstan.
An "innovative" anti-drug tactics had been recently announced here for representatives of Mass-Media, international organizations and local community: the law-enforcement agencies must apply all their efforts "to make drugs extremely expensive, and to make the drugs transporting extremely risky".
To be realistic, this innovative approach contains nothing new; the directives to seize as much drugs as possible have been existing during many years. Today the above expression sounds like a slogan for the regular anti-drug law-enforcement actions.
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Tajikistan.
It is expected, that completed withdrawing of Russian Border Troops and weakening of the border protection will cause the considerable increase of the drugs-flow, coming from the neighboring Afghanistan. According to some sources, harvested in Afghanistan in 2004 opium allows to produce 420 tons of heroin. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime published an annual report, confirmed involving all Afghan provinces into the opium poppy harvesting, drugs made 60% of the gross national product, above 10% of the country population involved into narco-production.
The Republican Drug Control Agency, in cooperation with Ministry of Interior of Afghanistan and American colleagues initiated number of successful actions against narco-dealers on Afghan territory. The Conference of Leaders of Drug Control Agencies of CIS countries, that had place in Moscow few days ago, stressed a necessity to build "a security belt" around Afghanistan as a task of outmost importance. It is worth to mention, that creation of this "belt" had been initiated by UN in 1997-98, but, because of multiply "week spots" existing along the entire Afghan border, the process was not completed.