Belarus

A landlocked eastern European country bordered by Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, Belarus is a former Soviet republic that declared its independence in 1990. The country's economy remains state-controlled, and depends on trade with Russia and the European Union. The second half of the 2000s saw an industrial boom in Belarus after a slump following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Drug trafficking and domestic drug abuse have become more serious problems in recent years.

There is little reliable hard data on drug use in Belarus, a topic that does not seem to have even been surveyed for published reports until 2007. At that time, a survey supported by the United Nations found that 58.7 percent of Belarusian young people had smoked tobacco, 16 percent did so regularly, 86 percent had consumed alcohol, and again 16 percent did so regularly. About 7 percent had tried one or more recreational drugs, with marijuana the most popular (6.8 percent had tried it), followed by inhalants (5.3 percent), MDMA (1.3 percent), tranquilizers (1.1 percent), LSD (0.9 percent), and psychedelic mushrooms (0.4 percent). A very low number of respondents reported regular drug use. There is always considerable concern over how much to trust the accuracy of self-reported drug use, of course.

There are no scientifically sound estimates of the extent of drug use among the adult population, only the Narcological Register, in which the law requires that the names of those who test positive for illegal drugs in their urine be recorded. This not only leaves [Page 90]out those who are not tested or use infrequently enough to have tested negative, but gives no indication of usage patterns. Those who have been entered into the register, though, remain under observation by the authorities for one to three years, depending on whether they are believed to be an addict; at the end of the period, their name may be removed if there has been no evidence of further usage. Injectable opium (76 percent in a 2008 study) and heroin (11.9 percent) were by far the most common drugs resulting in their users entering the register. Stimulants accounted for only 2.6 percent, sedatives only 0.8 percent. Even these numbers tell us as much about testing—what behaviors lead to being drug-tested, which drugs are likely to be used regularly enough that their users will be caught by a test—as they do about Belarusian drug usage.

As is generally the case outside the most wealthy industrialized nations, drug treatment facilities in Belarus are nearly always focused on detoxification. Addiction counseling is only occasionally available, usually for the wealthy or those already in the care of a psychiatric facility. Any national attempt at drug abuse prevention and education is in its infancy. However, the government's late 1990s multi-ministry initiative to educate the public about the risks of human immunodeficiency virus and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) and the resulting decline of new HIV infections has provided a sort of blueprint for such an attempt. The Ministry of Education has adopted a program of school-based drug abuse prevention that includes posters, brochures, and other informational materials presenting children with the consequences of drug use, while courses on teaching drug abuse and HIV/AIDS awareness have been added to the curriculums of the country's universities.

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