STUPID

CIRCUMSTANCES

The school year for many little Tuvans and their teachers starts later. Because it's a cleaning service. At the end of summer and early autumn, wild-growing hemp ripens. And in order to gather children for school, Tuvan families, from young to old, go to ...

The school year for many little Tuvans and their teachers starts later. Because it's a cleaning service. At the end of summer and early autumn, wild-growing hemp ripens. And in order to gather children for school, Tuvan families, from young to old, go out into the field. The villages are empty, you can see from the road - people are walking in the steppe. When you, a stranger, disappear beyond the horizon, they will continue to clap their hands and roll off the sticky tar from them, and whoever is younger will run again, collecting pollen on a sweaty body.

Rastaman paradise. "Tuvinka" (the so-called local grass) is considered the second in quality after the Chui marijuana. This business is profitable. Boxes at the collection point, in Kozhuun, cost 200-300 rubles, in Kyzyl, the capital of Tuva, - 500, in transit Abakan, the capital of Khakassia, - 1-1.5 thousand, in Krasnoyarsk - 3-4 thousand rubles, and in Moscow the price reaches 5-6 thousand.

After the erection of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the Asian part of Russia became a raw-material appendage of the empire; now, as a resource-producing colony, Siberia is more rapidly integrated into the world market than Russia as a whole. What natural resources could Tuva offer, remote from the railway? The mass exodus of the Slavic population from the Zasayan Republic in the early 90s led to a halt in industrial enterprises. And the collection of hemp became a real branch of the local economy, boxes of dope - its currency. The global division of labor assigned the republic the role of a hemp colony. If earlier "wild plants" were collected only for their own consumption, now they exchange weed with couriers for everything that is necessary for life: food, cars, motorcycles, horses, alcohol. The economic crisis, unemployment, increased demand for drugs have taken their toll.

Estimates of the "set of areas of focal growth" differ significantly. Previously, it was believed that the fields of wild-growing hemp spread in Tuva for 32 thousand hectares, then official data increased to 35-36 thousand hectares. Immediately at the republican seminar, experts announced 72 thousand hectares. And the head of the regional department of the Federal Drug Control Service for the Krasnoyarsk Territory, Anatoly Samkov, referring to satellite imagery data, allotted 84,000 hectares to Tuvan hemp. The latest figures published by the press service of the government of Tuva and based on reports from the localities, from the kouun administrations, are as follows: 26.2 thousand hectares are infested with hemp. This year, they planned to destroy 21.6 thousand hectares. But for some reason it doesn't work. Even despite the fact that the campaign against plants is being conducted according to all the bureaucratic rules of war: a headquarters for organizing the destruction of grass has been created under the government, an action plan has been approved, a republican targeted anti-drug program has been adopted, and 2005 has been declared the year of the fight against wild-growing hemp.

Calculating the size of hemp fields is similar to the situation with counting drug addicts: their official number should be multiplied by at least 10. About half a million Russians who use drugs are registered. But their real number is estimated at 6 million. In Tuva, one thousand drug addicts are registered, but at recent parliamentary hearings of the Legislative Chamber of the Great Khural, it was said that at least 10 thousand people cannot live without drugs.

An equally crafty order of numbers is in the financing of the anti-drug program. Money is found 10 times less than required. Therefore, pesticides are not enough, but only they give some guarantee that after the rains the second growth of hemp will not sprout. And so far they are fighting against plant evil mainly with purely mechanical methods of BUKs - teams for the destruction of hemp. Police officers are attached to the tractor drivers. They both guard the weed killers (there have already been clashes) and supervise them so that they do not succumb to the temptation to turn into grass collectors.

Republican authorities complain about the passivity of local authorities. But deep down they understand. Thanks to the grass, it is possible to repair schools and hospitals. They say that a Russian teacher who spoke the Tuvan language, who came as a tourist to the city of Chadan (in the east of the republic), was offered a place at the school as a teacher of English and Russian. Annual earnings - 400 boxes. Thus, hemp simply helps the republic to survive. As those involved in this craft say: "Ganjubas, ganjubas helped me out more than once." Tuva is lucky, according to the most tolerant Russians: there is something to sell. Other regions don't even have that.

Senator from Tuva Lyudmila Narusova suggested collecting cannabis as a medicinal raw material for pharmaceuticals or supplying “Tuva” to countries where the use of soft drugs is legal, for example, to Holland: “We must not fight the rain that pours in a drought, but put it at the service ". However, the proposal did not receive a response. And last year, the head of Tuva, Sherig-ool Oorzhak, in a radio address blessed the people for the war with plants:

“We cannot passively wait for the cannabis thickets to disappear on their own, for the simple reason that more and more people are involved in the drug business as gatherers of raw materials, drug couriers and consumers of this intoxicating potion,” the head of the Tuvan government said. — Drug dealers from Khakassia, the Krasnoyarsk Territory, Novosibirsk, Kemerovo, Irkutsk regions, other regions of Russia and the CIS countries consider the territory of the republic as a raw material base for the production of drugs of plant origin — marijuana and hashish.

About the interregional and international drug mafia - everything is so. The hemp export industry from Tuva was brought under control by the Caucasian clans. Drugs go along the Askizsky tract or taiga paths through the Tashtypsky district to the Republic of Khakassia, neighboring Tuva. On the streets of Abakan in September, the number of cars with Tuvan license plates increases sharply. A slightly smaller flow of hashish goes along the Usinsky highway, connecting Tuva with Krasnoyarsk and laid by convicts along the Uriankhai cattle trail. In front of the stationary police posts, drug couriers with cargo disembark from the cars, bypass them and get back into the cars after a few versts. Further, Tuvan hashish spreads across Siberia, Russia, they are sold even in cafes in Amsterdam.

The nearest railway station to Tuva is the Khakass town of Abaza. At the end of August, as a result of a large-scale operation, the drug control of Khakassia took one of the ethnic groups here, which was distributing hashish from Tuva throughout Siberia. Drug couriers boarded trains and followed to Novokuznetsk, Surgut, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk.

In Tuva itself, they do not like to share the peculiarities of the national recipe for survival, but Khakass operatives clearly state that a drug-producing region is working tirelessly in Russia. And if border guards and customs stand in the way of drugs from Afghanistan, the countries of Central Asia, then the drug flow from Tuva spreads through Russia almost unhindered.

Returning from Tuva to greater Russia for answers to questions that arise, right there, crossing the administrative border, you understand that the drug control has its own nonsense in the head. Not the dope that is in quotation marks (as they call dope grass “junkies”), but naturally dope. According to Dahl's dictionary. Having intimidated veterinarians, cacti growers and booksellers, the drug police took on the producers of hemp (hemp fiber). In the Soviet era, thousands of hectares of state farm fields in the south of the Krasnoyarsk Territory were sown with specially bred at the seed station "Ermakovskaya local". This is industrial hemp - psychotropic substances in it are not higher than 0.05%, but the yield of fiber is high. It is of no interest to herbal smokers, it is not Cannabis Indica with its 15% by weight of the plant Datura. Nevertheless, these fields are now overgrown with weeds, like a forest. Every single hemp factory, of which there were many, has piled up. The last victim of the drug police was the plant in Idrinsky. Founded under Khrushchev, it was transformed into Yutan LLC, two lines worked - for the production of tow and long fiber, from which hemp ropes are woven. The demand for natural products is huge. But drug fighters raided from Minusinsk, the plant was closed, the plantations were plowed up, and the raw materials were burned. The director almost got two criminal articles sewn on, the prosecutor's office defended the manufacturer of the tow. But now he can only saw and sell his equipment for scrap.

Meanwhile, the Khakassian drug police are clearing the shelves in grocery stores. Recently, the Alpi hypermarket in Khakassia was forced to withdraw from sale the Swedish beer Hansblute, which contains an extract of hemp inflorescences and leaves. Drug control was supported by the anti-monopolists, who decided that the label with the image of peasants peacefully reaping a hemp field contained an element of drug advertising.

Such an imitation of the struggle. And next to it are endless fields of Tuvan seven-leaf. Why aren't drug fighters from the neighboring regions of Tuva sent to the front line, who don't know what else to apply their efforts to, why do they fight in the rear? When the authorities wanted to curb Anatoly Bykov, the shadow owner of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, they gathered detectives from all over Russia on the banks of the Yenisei. It turns out that the authorities are satisfied with the current state of affairs in Tuva. After all, by starting a biological war in the republic, the bureaucracy runs the risk of finding a whole lot of problems. So far, thanks to the collection of hemp, a huge part of Tuva survives on its own, without begging from the state. And to destroy the source of livelihood of the arats (peasants), the numerous unemployed youth, considerable courage is needed.

In addition, since V.V. Putin has decided to overcome poverty, there is no doubt that a steady increase in the well-being of the population is a short-term prospect. And this, of course, will cause an increase in demand for drugs. There is an opinion about cannabis as an alternative to hard drugs. The bearers of the idea of ​​marijuana and hashish legalization sing of the herbal Tuvan paradise and its glorious guardians, who "fix a vegetative barrier on the way of white heroin death."

And the kids run through the hemp fields, earning their own pencils.

Help "New"

Narcotics police of Tuva detained the wife of the vice-mayor of Kyzyl, Sergei Ondar, who oversees the economic block in the administration of the republican capital, for selling drugs on an especially large scale. The official's wife did not live in poverty - she owns a gas station. And in addition to this business, she bought drugs of plant origin from the population for resale. The operatives bought 136 boxes of hashish weighing more than 2 kilograms from her, after which they detained her. At local prices, this is 70-80 thousand rubles. And, say, in Norilsk the same batch of hashish can be sold at retail 10 times (and in winter - 20) more expensive. There, a box (15 grams) of hashish costs 5,000 rubles, and in winter it costs twice as much.

The prosecutor's office opened a criminal case under Art. 228 of the Criminal Code. On it shines from 8 to 20 years in prison. Shortly before this, a citizen Mongush, a deputy of the local self-government of one of the districts, was charged under the same article.