Health and human security - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 175

The real problem is that people are not used to having prisons, not to say
prison hospitals, in their neighbourhood. Estonia is a very 'new' society.
We are used from Soviet times for prisons to be very closed. Nobody
knew what was going on there. Now the prisons have become part of
society, but it takes time for people to get used to this. People don't
understand why prisoners should be given good conditions. This is a pro-
cess of familiarization which will take time.
Other typical examples of the second category of problems, where project
participants in the recipient countries agree on the particular action but find
it difficult to 'sell' to the post-Soviet public, concern information campaigns
for safe sex and harm reduction measures targeted at intravenous drug users.
'Parents have a tendency to dislike this kind of information, they find it
unnecessary and feel it does more harm than good,' a Russian medical worker
noted on efforts to provide safe sex information for schools.
Likewise, some of our interviewees mention problems associated with harm
reduction projects aimed at prostitutes and intravenous drug users. There is a
tendency among Russian officials, they say, to think that drug abuse, and in
particular prostitution, are not really widespread in their country (cf. state-
ments above to the effect that prostitution is 'not really a Russian thing',
and that figures on communicable diseases are inflated to attract funding
from federal authorities and foreign donors). Similarly, some of our inter-
viewees observed that officials tended to 'close their eyes' to drug abuse, often
because they simply do not know how to tackle it. As far as prostitution
is concerned, it might be not so much that officials do not think it exists,
but, as a male-dominated bureaucracy, they silently 'approve' of it and there-
fore resent foreign interference. Somewhat along the same lines, we were told
that the police or other governmental officials even work as pimps for street
prostitutes.
Finally, our interviewees also suggested that drug addicts in Russia and
the Baltic states are generally regarded as criminals, more deserving of
punishment than assistance. This has in some instances impeded the imple-
mentation of projects to distribute clean needles to intravenous drug users. 16
In one Northwest Russian city, permission was obtained from the police to
run a 'needle bus', but when it started up (the police had been informed of
the opening date in the application), the police came and arrested the drug
users . 17 The result, in all these cases, is that project participants in the post-
Soviet countries carry out their tasks in a partly hostile environment, without
the understanding or support of the authorities or the public. Sometimes
there is outspoken criticism of the priorities made by the Task Force. One of
our Baltic interviewees said that the needle exchange project seemed more a
goal in itself for the Task Force than a means to an end (improved health secu-
rity). He meant, in other words, that the Task Force insistence on culturally
sensitive projects such as needle exchange is somewhat 'contrived'. However,