"What Europe prompts us to - free spread of metadon (a medicine replacing heroin) in penitentiaries - will lead to increasing the number of drug addicts. We are resolutely against it," Kalinin said.
"We have enough opportunities to prevent the penetration of narcotics into detention centers. Such cases are only a few," he stressed.
Kalinin noted that narcotics, mostly heroin and cannabis, are sometime put into parcels or, in rare cases, sought to be brought in by the personnel of penitentiaries, relatives and lawyers. Kalinin said that an attempt to bring in 0.2 gram of heroin by a penitentiaries worker was recently cut short in Moscow.
According to the Justice Ministry, as of January 1, 2004, 86,000 drug addicts were kept in detention centers. The number of convicts is now 855,000.
The ministry says that 35,217 HIV-infected cases, over 80 percent of whom are drug addicts, are among the convicts.
The share of drug-addicts among convicts is increasing, the Justice Ministry stressed. Their number is much more than alcoholics, numbering 55,000.
