ABSTRACT
In 1983, in a discussion with correspondents of Argumenty i fakty, the weekly information bulletin for agitprop workers, the leading narcologist, Eduard Babaian, firmly stated that the problem of drug abuse was virtually nonexistent in his country; there were merely "individual cases of addiction". The excerpt described how the main character secretly joined an expedition of "couriers" traveling to the distant steppes of Kazakstan to procure hashish so that Chingiz Aitmatov might study at first hand the origins of the spreading evil of drug abuse. The decision to replace the policy of silence about drug abuse with a campaign of enlightenment in the press, was possibly the result of pressure from the creative intelligentsia and the medical community–as had been the case with the anti-alcohol campaign. Thus medical workers, police officials, and employees of administrative bodies for youth affairs found themselves unprepared to deal with the tasks they faced in connection with the new policy on drug abuse.
