Research PaperPost-Soviet Central Asia: A summary of the drug situation
Section snippets
Background
The post-Soviet Central Asian Republics have an area of approximately 3,500,000 km2 (2/3 of the area of the EU) occupied by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, with a population of almost 60 million people of more than one hundred ethnicities (Embassy of the Republic of Kazakhstan, 2014).
All five countries gained their independence from the collapsed Soviet Union in 1991. The World Bank classifies these countries as transitional economies; however, major differences
Methods
This paper aims to provide the reader with a quick but sufficiently deep insight into what is known about the drug situation of four post-Soviet countries in Central Asia – all but Turkmenistan (see below). For this purpose, we use the system of harmonised key indicators (and core indicators) of drug epidemiology as established, constantly developed, and promoted by the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA; www.emcdda.europa.eu) in Lisbon. The EMCDDA system of drug
Drug use in the population
Reliable data on drug use and its patterns in the general population of the countries of Central Asia are not available. Historically, the only Central Asian survey targeting the use of addictive substances in the general population was conducted in Kazakhstan in 2001, and neither the sampling nor the quality of the questionnaire corresponded with international standards which is why the results of that survey are seen as irrelevant recently (Yusopov et al., 2012).
The situation is better in the
Discussion
The systematic efforts to build sustainable and self-developing national monitoring systems for the drug situation in post-Soviet Central Asia only started in the early 2000s. Given the number of acute infrastructure, economic, health, security, and other problems the developing/transitional economies have had to solve in the first decades of their sovereignty, it would probably not have been possible without the help of international organisations and donors. Besides the UNODC, for which the
Conclusion
The drug monitoring system in the four post-Soviet countries of Central Asia still needs substantial improvements in its structure and in the reliability of the data. Turkmenistan has completely failed to report any drug-related data so far, and for Uzbekistan, the relatively high availability of wide spectrum of data is somehow undermined by the impossibility of any external checking – a situation to some extent similar to Tajikistan.
However, the drug monitoring systems in all four countries
Conflict of interests
The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.
Funding
CADAP is funded by the European Union with the Grant Contract “External Actions of the European Union 229-666”. The work on this paper was supported by the Czech programme for institutional scientific support PRVOUK-P03/LF1/9.
Acknowledgements
The authors of this paper wish to acknowledge the continually excellent work of the EMCDDA on the scientific methodology in the drugs field, and its many-sided support to the process of building high-quality drug situation monitoring around the world. We also want to express our deep thanks to the “DAMOS core groups” – teams of national experts in the post-Soviet Central Asian countries that work with us in the countries and strive to build and institutionalise drug monitoring systems within
References (41)
- et al.
Breaking worse: The emergence of krokodil and excessive injuries among people who inject drugs in Eurasia
International Journal of Drug Policy
(2013) - et al.
Mortality of registered drug users in Central Asia
International Journal of Drug Policy
(2014) - et al.
Understanding the trends in HIV and hepatitis C prevalence amongst injecting drug users in different settings—Implications for intervention impact
Drug Alcohol Depend
(2012) - et al.
HIV and HCV among people who inject drugs in Central Asia
Drug Alcohol Depend
(2013) - et al.
- et al.
TREAT – Treatment Methodologies
(2012)The World Factbook. The World Factbooks (annual)
(2013)- (2000)