The drug that Europeans are turning to in a world of late capitalism

Europe’s crystal meth trade is changing. In the Czech Republic a long-established cottage industry has given way to industrial-scale ‘kombilabs’, as international organised crime groups push into a growing market.

Flashing blue lights punctured the darkness on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Ostrava in the east of the Czech Republic. At around 5am armed officers forced open a metal door and inside found drums of chemical precursors stacked to the ceiling along with distillation pipes. The acrid smell of ephedrine cooking hung in the air. Another clandestine laboratory had been dismantled.

This police raid was just one incident in Czechia’s never-ending war against this nation’s drug of choice. They don’t call it crystal meth here, but pervitin, the name of the stimulant given to Wehrmacht troops on a massive scale in the second world war. Eighty years on, it’s still widely available in Central Europe’s industrial margins. It’s also referred to as the ‘poor man’s cocaine’ as a gram of methamphetamine sells for around $35, a fifth of the price of the real thing, cocaine.

Pervitin is everywhere, from school playgrounds in Bohemia to Prague’s main railway terminus. The country’s largest women’s prison in the town of Světlá nad Sázavou is in a former communist-era holiday camp among fields and farmland; 60% of its 950 inmates are here for drug-related offences and more than half have meth addiction problems.

Gabriela, 33, was wearing a prison-issue grey tracksuit. She first tried meth at 16 in the school playground. Soon she left education, became pregnant by her dealer and started working as a care assistant in a nursing home. At weekends her two daughters went to their grandparents while she continued injecting. ‘It’s like flipping a light switch,’ she told me. The drug made all her problems disappear: poverty, anxiety, even time itself.

Unlike the image of ‘crystal’ being smoked or snorted, which has been popularised by US shows such as Breaking Bad, in Czechia the drug is mainly injected: over 90% of high-risk users take it this way. When Gabriela ran out of veins – and money – someone offered to teach her how to ‘cook’ – to (…)

Full article: 3 212 words.

Prune Antoine

Prune Antoine is a novelist and journalist.

* Jean-Philippe Chippaux is a doctor and director of research at the Institute of Development Research at Dakar in Senegal. He is the author of ‘Pratique des essais cliniques en Afrique’ (IRD Editions, Paris, 2004)

(1) Complément d’enquête, France 2, 17 January 2005.

(2) The case remains unresolved.

(3) US department of health & human services, Washington, 2001.

(4) See Harry M Marks, The Progress of Experiment: Science and Therapeutic Reform in the United States, 1900-1990, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

(5) To verify the effectiveness of the drug, those participating are divided into two groups, one of which receives a dummy tablet that does not contain the active ingredient.

(7) See Patrick Trouillet, C. Battistella, J. Pinel, Bernard Pécoul, « Is orphan drog status beneficial to tropical disease control ? », Tropical Medecine and International Health, Oxford, 1999, 4, p. 412-420.

(8) Philippe Kourilsky, Vaccination : quand l’éthique devient immorale, Pour la Science, Paris, 2004.

(9) See the report to the French prime minister, Philippe Kourilsky and Geneviève Viney, Le principe de précaution, Odile Jacob and Documentation française, Paris, 2000.