|
Poland Narcotics
As in the case of AIDS victims, communist regimes
denied the
existence of drug addicts. The first private drug
treatment
center opened in 1970, and in the 1970s health and legal
professionals discussed the drug problem guardedly. Not
until the
1980s were organizations founded to combat drug addiction,
and
they were harassed and limited by government agencies
until 1989.
In 1992 between 4,000 and 5,000 Poles dependent on
narcotics were
being treated at facilities of the national health service
or
social organizations. The Ministry of Health and Social
Welfare
estimated that 200,000 to 250,000 persons were taking
drugs at
that time, however. In 1991 some 190 deaths were
attributed to
drug overdoses. Addicts under treatment were predominantly
from
the working class and the intelligentsia, male, and
younger than
thirty years of age (nearly half were under twenty-four).
The
most commonly abused substance, kompot, was a
powerful and
physically devastating drug readily produced from the
poppy
plants grown widely in Poland. The drug was injected
intravenously. Kompot moved through society via
informal
networks operating independently of the international drug
market.
In the period from 1986 to 1992, drug abuse in Poland
remained stable despite declining standards of living,
rising
unemployment, and a rising overall crime rate. As barriers
to the
West fell, however, amphetamine manufacture and
trafficking
introduced a new threat. By 1992, amphetamines from Poland
were
considered as serious a threat in Germany and Scandinavia
as
imported cocaine and heroine; at that time, an estimated
20
percent of amphetamines in Western Europe originated in
Polish
laboratories. The confiscation of 150 kilograms of cocaine
in
Poland in 1991 also indicated that domestic narcotics
production
was diversifying, and local authorities feared that
Colombian
drug cartels were investing in that activity. To counter
criminal
drug producers, who also were involved in other types of
crime,
Poland established a National Drug Bureau in 1991. Because
kompot remained much cheaper and more accessible in
the
early 1990s, however, the Polish market for amphetamines
remained
very small. Meanwhile, a 1990 law made illegal the
cultivation of
poppies without a government permit, and a new,
morphine-free
poppy species was introduced in 1991 to enable farmers to
continue poppy cultivation.
In 1992 nineteen of Poland's drug rehabilitation
centers were
operated by the Young People's Movement to Combat Drug
Addiction
(known by its Polish acronym, MONAR). Although hundreds of
people
were cured in such centers in the 1980s, the severe
treatment
methods of MONAR's two-year program caused controversy in
the
Polish health community. For that reason, in 1990 the
Ministry of
Health and Social Welfare began opening clinics that
emphasized
preparing individuals for life after treatment.
Data as of October 1992
|
