The opium war at the ‘roof of the world’: the ‘elimination’ of addiction in Soviet Badakhshan

This article provides an overview of drug consumption in the Pamirs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and examines the evolution of the early Soviet responses to opium smoking in Soviet Badakhshan on the basis of published literature, archival materials, oral histories and medical records. The author demonstrates that biomedicine remained significantly underdeveloped in that region during the first decades of Soviet rule, with central and local authorities relying on punitive and restrictive administrative measures in their fight against drug addiction. As these measures failed to wipe out opiate addiction in Gorno-Badakhshan, the opium war at the ‘roof of the world’ culminated in the Great Terror, providing the Stalinist regime with the ‘radical’ solution by liquidating drug dealers without any ‘show trials’ and incarcerating opiate consumers. The consequences of such administrative regulation of addiction in Soviet Badakhshan were dire: in the years between 1941 and 1968, only few patients with the diagnosis of narkomania were hospitalized in the Tajik Republican Psychiatric Hospital, while the exact numbers of repressed drug users who perished in prisons and Gulag camps are destined to remain unknown.