December 09, 2020

Workhouses disguised as rehabilitation clinics mushroom in Russia

topic:	Health and Sanitation
located:	Russia
editor:	Igor Serebryany

Thirty-four drug addicts sent by their relatives to what was supposed to be a rehabilitation clinic found themselves enslaved instead of receiving medical treatment or psychological counselling, an investigation completed this week revealed. Five owners of the facilities now face lengthy prison terms on charges of kidnapping and illegal incarceration.

The "clinic" located in two private households in the port city of Vladivostok in the Russian Far East has been operating since 2017. Its founders advertised the business as a "medical treatment and mental rehabilitation for the alcoholics and drug addicts" – the service which is in high demand in oppressed regions like the Far East. While some of the "clinic's" patients came there voluntarily, others were driven there by their relatives, and a few more were abducted from their homes or even from the streets by the facility's "head hunters".

In reality, no medical treatment had been provided. Instead, the "patients" were forced to work for free (what's more, their relatives paid for the "service" they believed to be rehabilitation). The illegal practice came to the spotlight in 2019 after one of the men, a 31-year-old sailor, died in the "clinic". He came there voluntarily to fight alcohol addiction, so his relatives were fully aware of his whereabouts. After the sailor stopped answering the phone calls, they went to the facility and found his body, with displayed signs of torture.

When the police arrived, they found three more dead bodies inside the household, an aide to the Maritime investigative committee's chief Aurora Rimskaya reported.

"The owners of the 'clinic' didn't let anyone leave once the person came in. The people were forced to call their relatives regularly telling them that the 'treatment' is going well and more money needs to be sent in order to complete the course of treatment. A monthly 'fee' was set at 35,000 rubles ($460). Those who refused to obey were beaten and otherwise tortured," she says.

The owners of the private prison face 12 years in a state-run prison if convicted.

These so-called "occupational therapy centres" are flourishing in Russia, with their exact number remaining unknown (the estimated number varies from several hundreds to tens of thousands). Most of them, in reality, are workhouses with patients used as slaves.

There are two types of illegal "rehabilitation clinics," the director of the National Health Institute Oleg Zykov explains.

"The first type consists of facilities that don't even extort money from the patients' relatives. Those facilities rent out their inmates to local construction sites, nearby farmers and other 'employers' as a slave workforce. As a rule, they exploit the people who have recently served prison terms and have nowhere else to go. As there are no probation programmes in Russia to help those people reintegrate themselves into normal life, such people face a tough choice between returning to criminal practice or to agree to work for food and shelter," he says.

The other type of these illegal establishments consists of facilities like that in Vladivostok, disguised as medical centres that charge for non-existent "treatment". Their owners force people to work for free, pretending (or, in rare cases, honestly expecting) that hard labour could help drug addicts to overcome their bad habits – which is scientifically incorrect, as no abuse can lead to psychological healing, Zykov stresses.

Only about one-tenth of rehabilitation clinics in Russia actually operate as rehabs and are transparent with outside control, according to Zykov. Those clinics use, for example, the "Twelve Steps" programme or other scientifically-based technics to return alcoholics or drug users to normal life.

Still, a whopping ninety per cent of the "clinics" keep running their illegal business just because people are willing to pay for a glimpse of hope rather than actual results, director of the Humanitarian Actions charity Sergei Dugin acknowledges.

"Those centres care little about the patients. They are interested in their relatives as an endless source of money. Once a person is inside, the trap shuts. The patients – or, rather, inmates – often spend time handcuffed around the clock. Their relatives are told that 'rehabilitation' would need more time and, consequently, more money. People have no choice but to pay, as they are not allowed inside the houses to check if this is true," he says.

According to the head of the National Anti-drug Union Nikita Lushnikov, that sort of business is very popular among former drug addicts who learned the ropes pretty well during their time in similar sites.

"Many of the people who have gone through such 'rehabilitation' learned that this is an easy way of making money. Since 2010, such centres started to mushroom in Russia. Currently, there are over ten thousand of that sort of centres in Russia. The authorities turn a blind eye to what is going on behind the tall fences, as there isn't a state-run agency dealing with addicts' rehabilitation," Lushnikov, once a drug addict himself, says.

Only when the situation in those centres became publicly known because of several violent deaths of patients, the authorities acknowledged the problem. In November, President Vladimir Putin called this a matter of national security, ordering the country's Security Council to check all known rehabilitation clinics and to restore the human rights of their patients where those are violated. Putin also admitted that the country needed a single governmental agency to administer that sector.

Answering the president's order, special police troops stormed one of such facilities in Bashkortostan republic in the Southern Urals and freed its residents. The owner of the "clinic" was then sentenced to nine years behind bars.

Earlier, the bill presented by the Health Ministry to the parliament, State Duma, which offered to put all private rehabilitation centres under state control, failed to pass through the house.

Image by Vovka