http://www.yahoo.com/headlines/current/international/stories/russia.html (Einblicke ins Internet, 10/1995)
MOSCOW (Reuter) - Russian officials trying to fight drug abuse in the vast former Soviet Union said Thursday their own legislators could make their work even harder with plans to ease narcotics laws.
``The new penal code eases sentences for drug users from 10 years to five. It's incomprehensible,'' Nikolai Kovalyov, deputy head of the Federal Security Service, told Reuters.
He was speaking after a government commission recommended changes to the new code to give the health ministry's drugs control committee more teeth and toughen prison sentences for drug-related crimes.
Kovalyov said it was ``unfortunate'' that he also had to deal with corruption, illegal arms dealing and smuggling, as the battle against drugs alone gave him more than enough to do.
Gangsters have found a relatively comfortable niche in the former Soviet Union, where impoverished bureaucrats are easy to bribe and police are pushed to deal with a wave of new crimes.
The interior ministry says more than 1.5 million of Russia's 150 million population use narcotics.
This is a far cry from the Soviet era, where the first three cases of heroin abuse and the first two cases of cocaine abuse were reported only in 1988, decades after Western ``hippies'' had discovered hallucinogens.
Drugs were strictly forbidden in the Soviet era, when they were described in official propaganda as a scourge of the capitalist West.
Eduard Babayan, head of the health ministry committee, indicated that a return to the old traditions would be a good thing. ``Any softening in legislation can only do harm,'' he said.
The officials could not explain why the lower house of parliament had decided to soften the terms for drug abuse in the draft legislation, which must be approved by the government before it can become law.
Data given out at the session from an international association against drugs said the number of drug-related crimes in Russia rose 59 percent in 1994 to 84,000.
By the start of 1995, the number of official drug addicts in the CIS stood at 65,000 while the number of people who were abusing drugs was 2.4 million.