Russian Drug Unit Criticized Over Dubious Tactics, Priorities

Viktor Cherkesov, left, was appointed last year to head a new Russian drug agency by President Vladimir Putin, with whom he had worked in the KGB. (Oleg Lastochkin -- Itar-tass)

MOSCOW -- When an urgent telephone summons came in to the Bon-Pet clinic last October, Alexander Duka responded as he always did for an emergency: He loaded up his medical bag, set off in his car and prepared to operate on an injured dog.

But when he arrived at the address the caller had given and prepared a syringe with the anesthetic ketamine, Duka found himself under arrest in a sting operation conducted by undercover agents of Russia's powerful new drug-fighting agency.

Formed a year ago to bring the full force of the country's law enforcement to bear against a growing drug crisis, the agency -- headed by a close friend of President Vladimir Putin from the KGB -- has an army of 40,000 at its disposal, four times larger than the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

But at a time when Russia is reeling from terror attacks that have killed 1,000 people in the past two years, critics point to the new agency as a study in misplaced priorities and questionable tactics.

Resources that could have been devoted to fighting big-time drug traffickers or cracking down on Chechen guerrillas have gone instead to campaigns against veterinarians, physicians and dentists, vendors of popular T-shirts bearing images of marijuana leaves and bookstores that sell tomes on the medicinal uses of illegal narcotics.

"It's classic Russian bureaucracy: to search not where something is lost but where the light is hanging," said Vladimir Pribylovsky, a political analyst who runs the Panorama research organization in Moscow. "It's easier to fight against books than heroin or terrorists."

"This is a new agency that wants to show society how active they are and whose agents believe they can use whatever methods they want," added Duka, who was convicted by a Moscow court last week of criminal possession of a drug that was illegal at the time but has since been legalized and is the only anesthetic widely available here for animals. "I am just one of the veterinarians who became part of this provocation on their part. Any veterinarian could have been in my place."

To many critics, the Federal Drug Control Agency has become a sort of reincarnated KGB, employing Soviet-era tactics to suppress alternative points of view and running symbolic campaigns while failing to tackle the sources of the Russian drug business. Many of its top officials spent much of their careers in the KGB. The drug agency's director, Viktor Cherkesov, investigated Soviet dissidents when he was a top official in the spy agency's infamous 5th Directorate.

Many of the drug agency's victories have been symbolic, such as persuading a court to declare that leaflets urging a change in Russian policy were illegal pro-drug "advertising" and seeking the closure of clean needle programs aimed at fighting the country's growing AIDS epidemic.

In a rare interview, Cherkesov acknowledged certain "mistakes" and "difficulties" as his agency has begun its work, but said most of them were public relations issues. "Society doesn't always understand what we are doing and why," he said.

On the cases against veterinarians, for example, he said, "I believe we did make a mistake, not in the application of the law but in explaining our position to the society."

As for book seizures, he said that perhaps employees needed to be more "sensitive" but also insisted the agency had targeted only books "that contain obvious propaganda information. What I mean is recipes for drug preparation, description of a person's state of mind on certain drugs as a way of advertising, which forms a desire in the reader to take these drugs."

During the Soviet era, closed borders and police-state law enforcement meant, as Cherkesov put it, that "the drug culture was virtually nonexistent." Today, Russia has a serious and rapidly growing drug problem, fed by a huge inflow of narcotics from Afghanistan and Central Asia. Estimates of the number of drug addicts in Russia range between 1 million and 4 million.

Cherkesov said he pushed Putin to create the new agency in late 2001, arguing that it was necessary not only because of the size of Russia's newfound drug habit but because of "widespread corruption" among police who were supposed to be dealing with it.