YEKATERINBURG (Russia): Katya Nikitina could not sleep, think, or move during her first seven days at the rehab clinic.

A heroin addict in the Urals in western Russia, she moved from Chelyabinsk to the facility in Yekaterinburg, the area’s main urban centre, to get clean.

“It’s hard to think back to that time. You can’t sleep, sit, or stand from the pain, you just walk around in the dark, bumping into furniture,” she recalled.

Like all the addicts there, she was locked in a small room with a barred window and was kept on a diet of bread, porridge, and onions, for a month-long “quarantine” period.

Today, Katya, 28, is one of three dozen girls living in the rehab centre set up by the City Without Drugs, a foundation that is unique in Russia whose harsh methods have gained support in a country worried about soaring drug addiction.

Unusually, it combines a cold-turkey coercion method of rehab and a dealer-busting operations unit. It is private and has no links to the powerful Russian Orthodox Church.

Heroin now accounts for less than half of Russia’s illegal drugs, says organisation head Evgeny Roizman. But new drugs are harder to catch and are even more destructive, targeting increasingly younger Russians.

Russia’s drug control agency estimates that there are about five million drug users in the country, and while drug deaths are not well documented, there are about 100,000 deaths annually among 15 to 30-year-olds, the age-group of heaviest use.

Drug-related deaths are also worsening the country’s population decline since the fall of the Soviet Union, and Russia has long been criticised by international groups for failing to properly combat the problem.

“Right now the government’s policies are ineffective,” Roizman said of Russia’s drug problem. “There is no political will. The government’s main task is to keep its population, and they are failing at it.”—AFP