Kazakhstan drugs documentary exposes synthetics scourge
Statistics on drug use in Kazakhstan are hard to come by, and the government is more comfortable prosecuting addicts than overseeing their rehabilitation.
Dmitri, an amateur hip-hop producer and interviewee for a new documentary about Kazakhstan’s synthetic drugs problem, doesn’t like to listen to the tracks he recorded during days-long speed binges several years ago.
“Do you hear the beat? It is evil, you understand? I think about what condition I was in and how I sat here and came up with those lyrics. Just awful,” Dmitri said. “I threw five years away.”
The explosion of synthetic drugs in Kazakhstan’s largest cities and the massive human cost is the subject of Rinat Balgabayev’s 41-minute film “Salt,” which has racked up more than 700,000 views on YouTube since its release in late June.
Viewers also meet other former users like Rim, whose addiction left him with two convictions and sepsis in his lungs and heart, and Dinara, whose habit made her suicidal and who was raped more than once while using.
The interviews highlight how the drugs have become more readily available over the last 10 years or so, despite government boasts of increasing lab busts.
In one particularly eerie insight, Dmitri recalled how as an addict it was sometimes possible to steal packets of mephedrone intended for other users by feeling underneath the tables and chairs in playgrounds.
These were regular drop-off points for dealers, he explained. Dmitri also affirmed what specialists have long warned: Users are getting younger.
“If I smoked weed when I was a teenager and only tried [synthetics] at 21, now synthetics are the first thing kids try,” Dmitri said.
Balgabayev acknowledges that the documentary is not a comprehensive treatment of the issue. His main aim was to start a conversation, he said.
The 37-year-old’s interest in addiction came from repeated conversations with younger acquaintances who spoke freely of their drug use.
“I thought drug use was a marginal problem. But these people I was talking to were mainstream, white-collar workers,” Balgabayev told Eurasianet.
Statistics on the extent of drug use in Kazakhstan are hard to come by, and the government is more comfortable prosecuting addicts than overseeing their rehabilitation.
Last year authorities enacted changes to the criminal code which will make possession of a gram or more of stimulants like PVP and MDPV (mephedrone) punishable with prison time. Police said in May that they had liquidated 17 synthetic drug operations in the first four months of this year, compared to 20 in the whole of 2021.
Balgabayev is pessimistic that this is doing anything to solve the problem.
“Our Interior Ministry still works according to quotas. They need to catch 10 thieves, one bribe-taker, 30 narcotics addicts and so on,” he said.
Doubts about due process in the war on drugs were strengthened in April after seven members of a high-profile boy band were sentenced to between 15 and 17 years in jail for their alleged role in a synthetic-narcotics ring.
The group, Mad Men, is part of a controversial “Q-pop” trend, modeled on South Korea’s K-pop, which has defiantly challenged traditional notions of masculinity in Kazakhstan.
Nikolai Kharchenko, a lawyer in the case, said that the witnesses called by the prosecution offered no evidence of how the drugs had been manufactured or supplied. Several witnesses reversed their testimonies, but this fact was ignored by the court, Kharchenko said at a June press conference.
The one Interior Ministry official who appears in “Salt” mostly complains about the difficulty of identifying dealers who use the Internet to keep distance from their clients, while stressing the new criminal punishments for possession.
Social solutions to the problem are coming from other places, the documentary suggests.
Activist Zhandos Aktayev and his friends are part of a group that covers up graffiti adverts for synthetics with spray paint – an activity that he said initially attracted police suspicion.
Another man, Bekzat Baisaforov, appears as the owner of a private rehabilitation center that offers four-month programs for up to 30 participants at a time.
Unless these kinds of efforts are scaled up and made widely accessible to addicts, there is little hope of what one interviewee called “the mephedrone age” reaching an end.
Daniyar Moldabekov is a journalist based in Almaty.
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