Showing posts with label rehabilitation programs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rehabilitation programs. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Saudi Arabia Defends Al-Qaeda Rehabilitation Scheme

THE TELEGRAPH: Saudi Arabia says it will not give up a controversial rehabilitation programme for Islamist radicals heavily criticised in the US after former inmates set up an al-Qaeda cell in neighbouring Yemen.

One former Guantanamo Bay inmate who went through the programme, which features "positive thinking" classes, art therapy and video games, is now deputy leader of Al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, the cell behind the Christmas Day "underwear bombing" in an airliner over Detroit.

Four others from the same group of Guantanamo inmates handed over to the Saudis in November 2007 are among more than a dozen inmates who have returned to terrorism, including one who was shot dead while wearing a suicide vest under a burka last year.

But senior officials including an Interior Ministry general and the cleric and psychologists responsible for overseeing the programme's "religious re-indoctrination" courses told The Daily Telegraph it had been an overall success.

"We are confident in our system," said General Mansur al-Turki. "Part of that is the rehabilitation programme, and when we say that we are considering one thing - the results we are getting. We are not giving up because a few people decided to go back and share al-Qaeda activities." >>> Richard Spencer in Riyadh | Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Friday, September 25, 2009


Heroin Addiction Spreads Like Wildfire in Russia

LOS ANGELES TIMES: As the drug has poured into the country from Afghanistan in recent years, Russians' relative ignorance about its dangers has taken a huge toll, especially on the young.

Reporting from Podolsk, Russia - The young man named Anton is a member of Russia's "lost generation."

He's the son of middle-class, college-educated engineers; he studied at a good university and became a truck sales manager in Moscow. He's also a 28-year-old heroin addict.

In the years since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan triggered a sharp increase in poppy cultivation, Russia has been flooded with heroin. The drug has crept along a trail stretching from Afghanistan through Tajikistan and other Central Asian nations and over the Russian border, turning this country into the world's top consumer of heroin, the government says.

The drug has spread like fire through a country uniquely unqualified to cope with its dangers: Narcotics were largely absent during Soviet times, and most people are still unaware of the risk of heroin addiction, even as an estimated 83 Russians a day die by overdosing on the drug, government figures show.

"It's a catastrophe for us. We were completely unprepared for this turn of events," says Evgeny Bryun, Moscow's chief drug addiction specialist. "We have our own lost generation."

The transition from a Soviet state largely free from heroin to a booming nation awash in the drug has been painful and dark, marked by widespread public ignorance of the risks and symptoms of addiction, lingering shame and stigma, and muddled government efforts at treatment.

Methadone, which is widely used in the West to wean people off heroin, is illegal in Russia, and rehabilitation programs are unavailable in many parts of the country. In 2007, Human Rights Watch concluded that the treatment at state drug clinics was "so poor as to constitute a violation of the right to health."

Meanwhile, at private clinics, all manner of experimental treatments -- including shock therapy and the removal of parts of the brain -- are in vogue. In Bryun's government-run clinic, addicts take turns sleeping hooked up to machines that send gentle electrical impulses through their brains, or lying encased in a full-body relaxation therapy machine.

Heroin has also emerged as a thorn in U.S.-Russian relations, as officials in Moscow have grown increasingly angry over what they describe as American indifference to the booming heroin trade.

On the margins of the grinding war in Afghanistan, U.S. efforts to eradicate poppy fields -- and to come up with persuasive incentives to wean farmers from the crop -- have remained largely ineffective for years.

In a nod of cooperation to the Obama administration, Russia recently agreed to allow cargo planes carrying U.S. troops and weapons to pass through the country en route to Afghanistan. But at the same time, it's lobbying noisily for tougher crackdowns on the cultivation of opium poppies, which are used in the production of heroin. Early this month, President Dmitry Medvedev called rampant heroin addiction "a threat to the country's national security."

Russia has called on the United Nations to link the foreign troop presence in Afghanistan to an obligation to destroy poppy plantations. >>> Megan K. Stack | Friday, September 25, 2009

LOS ANGELES TIMES PHOTOGALLERY:
Treating heroin addiction in Russia >>>

Watch AP video: Russian students may face drugs tests too >>>