Drug Rehab in Russia’s ‘City Without Drugs’
Drug rehab in the USA, compared to drug rehab in some other countries, can be a breeze. Here you are often given help to get through withdrawal, are fed well, coached through difficulties, helped with the problems in your life that led to drug addiction or alcohol abuse and given counseling and a program that will help you stay clean when you leave the program.
In Russia, it’s quite a different story. There are not many alcohol or drug addiction treatment facilities in the first place – far more are needed to handle their huge heroin problem – and I doubt there are any centers at all that offer the type of drug rehab program you would find in the U.S. – except perhaps a few to deal with celebrities or officials.
One of the programs they have for the general public, called City Without Drugs, is making the news lately and growing increasingly more popular.
Their primary drug problem is heroin addiction. So, for most of the addicts who come to City Without Drugs, heroin withdrawal is the first step.
The withdrawing heroin addicts are locked in a room with about 30 bunk beds, each one occupied by a person who is going through withdrawal. While on withdrawal, they are fed very little – bread, water and gruel. They say that it sometimes takes a month just to get through the withdrawal process.
After they’ve withdrawn, they don’t get any counseling – instead, you work. The jobs are sometimes menial and sometimes a little more creative. One news report talked about a recovering addict who is refurbishing the art on the walls of a damaged church.
How well you do, how cooperative you are, and so on, determines when you will get out. It could take as much as a year.
Russia has a real problem and the authorities say that other types of drug rehab just don’t work. What they are doing at City Without Drugs – locking people up – is actually illegal, except for the fact that they have the addict’s parents’ permission. Those parents think, not incorrectly, that their son or daughter is going to wind up dead if they don’t do something – they’d rather see them they go through that system, and live.
Not surprisingly, some human rights advocate groups are furious about City Without Drugs. But others actually think the country is doing the right thing considering the extent of the heroin problem. Russia’s heroin addiction situation is desperate – they get it directly from the poppy fields of Afghanistan, it’s ruining their country and their youth. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
There are obviously arguments on both sides. Perhaps eating only bread and water, and a little gruel, is tortuous. On the other hand, considering that the addicts aren’t likely to hold anything down when they’re withdrawing under those circumstances, it might not be the worst thing in the world.
Also, I can’t personally say that working for the next year alongside other recovering addicts and being a contributing member of society – which they have probably not been for quite a while – is the worst idea in the world. Could that not bring about positive change and a willingness and desire to live a normal, productive, drug-free life?
Some advocates have said that City Without Drugs should give their ‘clients’ methadone. Russia doesn’t believe in methadone, they call it an ‘American fad’. It certainly is well past ‘fad’ status, but giving someone methadone in the U.S. and Europe hasn’t led to fewer addicts – they’re just addicted to methadone now instead of heroin. Methadone is very difficult to stop taking. It was also recently announced that more accidental drug-related deaths are caused by methadone than any other drug. In other words, if they gave addicts methadone, they might wind up with an even more serious problem.
What do you think of the City Without Drugs approach?
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