Drug trafficking in Russia: A form of organized crime?

The decade following the breakdown of the Soviet Union has registered a rapid growth of illegal drug use and trade in Russia. Illicit psychoactive substances were consumed even prior 1991, but the former USSR did not participate significantly in the international drug market either as an importer or exporter. This pattern of relative self-sufficiency, however, drastically changed during the 1990s, at the same time as both the Russian drug demand and supply consistently expanded and diversified. If they can afford it, Russia drug users can today buy the same illicit psychoactive drugs that can be found in any Western European or North American city and that are imported from countries as far away as Colombia, Afghanistan and Holland. As a Moscow drug consumer puts it, "over the past ten years drugs have become accessible to whomever wishes to buy them" (Interview H11). The expansion of the Russian drug market during the 1990s also entailed the emergence of a nationwide drug distribution system, which brings illicit drugs from producers to consumers, and the consolidation of the professional role of the drug dealer. As much as in Western Europe and the USA up to the mid-1970s, the latter role did not exist in Russia up to the early 1990s. In Soviet times there was no nationwide drug distribution system: Soviet drug users largely consumed illegal psychoactive substances that were available in their region and often either harvested or produced the drugs themselves.