Drug Addiction and the Practice of Public Health in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia

Abstract

The relatively short period from 1914 to 1932 witnessed a radical change in the attitudes of both governmental authorities and professional communities towards drugs and addiction. Before the First World War, Russians could easily buy cocaine or heroin at a pharmacy, medical science did not view addiction as a serious social problem. There was practically no government regulation or legislation concerning recreational drugs. By the early 1930s, however, the market of recreational drugs had been heavily regulated, drug sale had been criminalized, and physicians and criminologists had begun to label drug addicts as bourgeois, degenerate, or otherwise socially anomalous people who should be sent to special camps. An important turning point occurred in late 1924, when Soviet authorities issued two decrees that provided a legal definition of criminal drug sales, signaling the start of a more intensive struggle against drug abuse. This paper examines the social practice of late Imperial and early Soviet public health in order to evaluate the evolution of “in-the-field” medical approaches towards opiate, cocaine and cannabis addiction. It focuses on the period when drug use was first constructed as a delinquency, and thus as a social problem requiring immediate intervention. It examines attempts of physicians and pharmacists to restrict and control drug production, distribution and sale; sanitary propaganda and other prophylactic measures; and the establishment of special institutions for the treatment of addicts. It is concerned only peripherally with the judicial prosecution of drug dealers and drug addicts.