Eliminating Drug Addiction: The Ways of Solving the Social Problem in Early Soviet Medical Texts

Essay from the year 2009 in the subject History Europe - Other Countries - Ages of World Wars, grade: A, University CEU San Pablo Madrid, language: English, abstract: Drug addiction is universally recognized as a crucial problem of the contemporary world, and there is a heated debate about it everywhere - Eastern Europe being no exclusion. The problem, however, is often presented largely simplified and there is a tendency to perceive recreational drugs as an unequivocal social evil and overestimate the role of the state in managing the problem. For some obvious reasons, Soviet historiography largely ignored the history of drug addiction in twentieth-century Russia, but it is striking that even today there is a clear lack of attention towards historical roots of the problem in this region a.......