Eastern Europe Shooting Up Under a Red Star

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In Hungary, homeless addicts jam the underground pedestrian passageways of Budapest's Moscow Square, and dealers ply the stairways, offering everything from hashish to morphine-laced pills. In Poland, groups of addicts travel to the outskirts of Warsaw to buy sacks of poppy stalks from farmers, which they use to concoct homemade heroin. And in the Soviet Union, a young man rolls up his sleeve to show television viewers an inner forearm riddled with needle marks.

For years, East-bloc officials have claimed that drug abuse did not exist in their countries, insisting that addiction was a product of "decadent" capitalism. Not anymore. In a dramatic about-face, Soviet and East European authorities have begun to crack down on drug suppliers, searching for ways to treat addicts and publishing an array of statistics to deter potential users. Reason for the turnabout: narcotics use not only exists in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe but is growing rapidly in some areas.

Spurred by Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev's campaign for glasnost, a more open airing of social ills, Moscow authorities last week provided a rare glimpse of the extent of the drug problem in the Soviet Union. In an interview published in the Communist Party newspaper Pravda, Internal Affairs Minister Alexander Vlasov said 46,000 Soviet citizens have been diagnosed as drug addicts -- a dramatic figure when compared with official estimates just two years ago that only 2,500 such hard-core users existed. Vlasov also revealed the results of operation "Poppy 86," a narcotics crackdown in which more than 4,000 drug dealers were arrested and some 250,000 acres of wild cannabis plants destroyed. Said Vlasov: "The struggle against drug addiction and crime connected with it has become one of the main tasks of the Internal Affairs Ministry."

Drug abuse in the Soviet Union stems mainly from the use of koknar, or opium made from poppy seeds, and anashi, a substance similar to marijuana, made from the cannabis plant. Both crops grow wild in the country's Central Asian region. Poppies are also cultivated legally, mainly for use in medicines. The Soviet approach to treating abusers of such drugs tends to be punitive. Under a new law, youthful offenders may be incarcerated for up to two years in a police-run "preventive educational treatment center." The job of these institutions, according to a recent article in the Soviet magazine Man and the Law, is to cure and "re-educate" inmates.

Officials in several East European countries have also begun confronting narcotics use -- and encountering similar problems. As recently as 1980, Poland was the only East-bloc nation in which drug abuse was openly discussed. Today only Bulgaria, Rumania and East Germany remain silent on the issue. In Hungary, experts estimate that between 30,000 and 50,000 people abuse drugs. In Poland, one out of every ten youths is believed to use narcotics at least occasionally. Says Warsaw Sociologist Antoni Bielewicz: "The numbers are staggering, and there is no end in sight."