The devil of addiction

Dr. Aleksander Laanemann's drug habit cost him nine years in prison. When he cleaned up his act, he immediately got into drug prevention in Estonia's most drug-ridden city, but his unorthodox views and methods have earned him his share of enmity. Interview by Sergei Stepanov.

Since Laanemann began working as an anti-drug counselor in Narva, he has angered other Estonian drug prevention activists with his accusations that they waste state money on ineffective treatment methods. His unorthodox views on addiction have helped make him into something of a pariah in the anti-drug community.

None of that has stopped him from speaking his mind, though, or from doing his job.

Do other drug prevention activists in Estonia shun you for daring to talk about sensitive subjects?

Yes, they say I am insane. The head of the AIDS prevention center once declined to appear on a TV show with me, saying she would not sit in the same room.

Does that bother you?

I am retired, I am not paid for working with drug addicts, and I spent nine years in prison, so I am not afraid of anything.

You have accused other anti-drug organizations of misspending public funds. How did you use the 27,000 kroons (1,688 euros) you received from the state this year?

On drug addicts' treatment and the medications doctors prescribed for them. Drug addicts usually have no social and medical insurance and nobody would examine them for free. The medications prescribed - tranquilizers and pain-killers - are expensive. I know from experience that a drug addict will always find money for drugs, but not for treating himself.

The treatment is not too expensive. Only a couple of thousand kroons are needed to take a person off the needle and keep him off it for half a year and then send to a rehabilitation center.

We used much cheaper medications than methadone, used in Tallinn, to substitute heroin. Those getting money for methadone programs in Tallinn do not like that Laanemann is getting better results with a cheaper medicine.

Drug prevention experts call drug addiction a disease. You think otherwise?

The main principle of our organization is that drug addiction is not a disease but a breach of decent behavior. You want to know why the addiction is not a disease? Because illness does not get you high. When a person gets high, his or her condition is the opposite of a disease.

I did not invent this concept. We have the law on narcotic substances and it reads that drug addiction is a mental or physical addiction developed after consuming narcotic substances. Not a word about it being a disease.

You have been living without drugs for 20 years. Don't you feel tempted?

I will always remember the pleasure I experienced when I first took drugs in the army and sometimes I want to feel it again.

But at the same time, I know I decided to give up drugs and that even one injection would ruin my world.

A drug addict has to be about 40 to give up drugs easily. By that age, all the colorful emotions of one's early 20s become black and white and the high is not the same.

The problem is that active drug addicts usually die by age 30.

You're 62. How did you manage to make it to 40 before quitting drugs?

I can tell you how to be a drug addict for 20 years and work as a doctor without exposing yourself. You just have to know your dose and stick to it.

This sounds like an ode to drugs. Might young people, upon hearing this, not be curious to try them for themselves?

The prevention work carried out among the youth today is not correct. Some lady comes to a school and says drugs are bad. But how can this talk convince me if I am getting pleasure from drugs?

My approach would be to say that drugs are the best things in the world, but we must reveal where the addiction leads. Show students a former drug addict who jumped out of the window and is now confined to a wheelchair. That would make the young people think twice.

How did you start?

I served in the Soviet army in Kaliningrad as chief physician and was in charge of the drugs.

A doctor who had served in Cuba joined our unit and one day asked me to give him half a cubic centimeter of morphine to soothe a headache. Then he started to come regularly. I wanted to try it too, as I saw him getting talkative and cheerful after injections.

My first time was awful. But in a week, I decided to try again and liked it a lot. I had easy access to morphine – in a unit ready for war there were tens of thousands of ampoules. They were valid for two or three years then had to be destroyed. But nobody checked how many I actually destroyed.

After military service, did you still have access to drugs?

I entered Tartu University and worked in an ambulance brigade so I still could get drugs. But I never stole morphine from patients, although I was accused of that and got nine years in jail.

Actually I just approached the head of health care in the town of Kohtla-Jarve, a former fellow student, and asked him to help me get rid of the addiction and enter rehab. But he filed a complaint at the prosecutor's office instead.

Did you get drugs in prison?

There was no problem with getting those in a Soviet prison. The prison guards actually sold them.

Once during an anti-drug crackdown, I was asked to either reveal the trafficking scheme or be sent to a tougher prison. I couldn't give in because the traffickers would probably have killed me, so I spent half of those nine years in a maximum-security prison. There I met a former drug addict who convinced me I should give up drugs. But maybe I just remembered my wife and two kids waiting for me at home.

Would you repeat your life again now, being aware of what the drugs really are?

Yes, I would. Maybe I cannot forget the pleasure I got from drugs. But if I could have foreseen where drugs would take me, I would never have started.

I think this devil of drug addiction is still in me, but I can somehow keep him quiet by working with drug addicts. Now when I manage to save someone, this is what gets me high.