The Development of an Illegal Market. Drug Consumption and Trade in Post-Soviet Russia

Abstract

A nationwide market in illegal drugs has developed in Russia in the decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the same time as Russian drug demand consistently expanded and diversified, the country has become fully integrated in international narcotics exchanges. Relying on the results of a research project commissioned by the UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, the article reconstructs the development of the illegal drug market in post-Soviet Russia. It describes the expansion of both drug demand and drug supply, analyses the organization of drug exchanges in Russian cities and investigates the local distribution systems. A nationwide market in illegal drugs has developed in Russia in the decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Illegal psychoactive substances were consumed even prior 1991, but they were usually produced and traded on a local basis. Due to travel and trade restrictions, the former USSR neither constituted a single drug market nor participated significantly in international narcotics exchanges as a consumer or supplier of illicit substances. However, this pattern of relative self-sufficiency drastically changed during the 1990s, at the same time as Russian drug demand consistently expanded and diversified. In 1999, the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law (MPI) was entrusted with a research project by the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (UNODCCP) to reconstruct the evolution of illegal drug use and trade in post-Soviet Russia. Under my leadership, a research team was assembled, which was composed of 15 Russian and foreign researchers. During the course of the project, beginning in October 1999, information was collected from a plurality of primary and secondary sources in nine different cities and regions: Moscow, St Petersburg, Nizhniy Novgorod, Rostov-on-Don, Balakovo, the Republic of North Ossetia, Krasnoyarsk, Khabarovosk, and Vladivostok. All in all, 90 in-depth interviews with key observers (law enforcement officials, drug-treatment providers, members of relevant NGOs, and journalists) were conducted in different parts of the Russian Federation and 30 indepth interviews were carried out with drug users in Moscow and St Petersburg. 1 Furthermore, together with the Research Institute of the Prosecutor General’s Office (RIPGO), the MPI research team analysed 50 criminal cases, as well as all relevant statistics, the Russian and international secondary literature, and topical articles published in the Russian press. By drawing on the findings of the aforementioned research project (Paoli 2001), the present paper aims to reconstruct the development of the illegal drug market in Russia.