In Russia, drug-addicts and people with AIDS get demonized, kidnapped, abused.

[DetlefK]

http://gizmodo.com/why-russias-heroin-addicts-are-going-through-hell-1787892724

This week, an HIV epidemic has been officially declared in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg, where the health department estimates 1 out of every 50 residents is a carrier of the virus.

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In Yekaterinburg, and elsewhere in the country, an estimated half of HIV infections were contracted through intravenous drug use. And yet, no one seems to be prepared to deal with heroin dependency effectively or ethically.

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“The public attitude is very hostile and the government doesn’t want to seem too humane towards drug users,” HIV activist Anya Sarang tells me.

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The government’s primary strategy for dealing with people struggling with addiction is “making them feel miserable,” Sarang says. “As if the social pressure will make them stop using drugs.”

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But among Russian authorities, it’s a despised “narcoliberal” idea. In a country with the largest population of injection drug users, methadone therapy is illegal. Methadone distribution is punishable with up to 20 years in prison. Heroin addicts— “anti-social elements,” as they’re called—are expected to quit cold-turkey, perhaps in one of the jail-like “treatment” centers.

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In 2010, a video appeared on the internet of a young man thrusting on a couch, as if receiving anal sex, saying, “I am a junkie; it is a disease. Why does everyone laugh at me?” A stern male voice answers off-screen: “No, my dear, you are a fag. Because all junkies are fags! But not all fags are junkies.” This was a sort of a PSA, produced under the government program named “Comprehensive measures to combat the spread of drug dependency and alcoholism in Krasnoyarsk Region, 2010-12.”

It was a particularly bizarrely hateful episode, but it wasn’t entirely off brand. Many government officials still pitch heterosexual monogamy as the only preventative measure against sexual transmission of HIV and consider addiction to be a moral sickness. Then there’s the convenient theory that both addiction and HIV are not homegrown, but the inventions and imports of the West.

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HIV is not a Russian disease, RISI said, but a Western moral problem. It has been imported into Russia through the corruption of Russia’s “conservative ideology and traditional values” in a capitalistic conspiracy by the foreign makers of condoms and sex toys.

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The director of the Federal Drug Control Service promised that the legalization of methadone—what he called “soft drugs”—would never happen. In his mind, “the army of drug users” are an “inaccessible category” of people who “don’t seek to recover and avoid all contact with medical institutions and authorities in general.” He wasn’t a big fan of needle exchange programs either. All they do is “attract the unnecessary attention of healthy people.”

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According to the report, while courts can order mandatory addiction treatment, there are very few places they can send people; some government officials even proposed sending addicts to rural communes for “labor therapy.”

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The City Without Drugs organization is still active, as is their YouTube channel. It features hundreds of videos of drug addicts being dragged half-conscious through the street, their faces not blurred, or confessing their alleged worthlessness, their hopelessness, their shame.

City Without Drugs founder, Yevgeny Roizman, was condemned by SOVA not only for inhumane treatment of his “patients,” but for his racist and xenophobic statements, nearly inciting “pogrom-like” violence. He is now the mayor of Yekaterinburg.

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Since launching their case, all three have been harassed by the authorities. Teplinksaya was arrested again in 2014—for holding a can of beer on her way back from the beach, she says. According to Teplinksaya, the Prosecutor’s office in Togliatti has tried repeatedly to pressure Project April into firing Anoshkin, for example by imposing fines on the organization for things like “having the wrong model of smoke detector.” Kurmanayevskiy promptly lost his job as a substance addiction counselor at the Healthy Country Foundation after he applied to the ECHR.


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Russia-apologist showing up with a "both-sides-do-it" in 3... 2... 1...

[Blue_Tires]

1. I'm sure Snowden and Greenwald will get right on it...