AN IRON curtain of AIDS

Shirka, they call it - means black. Or chornie - ‘gypsy’. Nothing as sophisticated as heroin. What you do is buy a bunch of dried opium poppies for the equivalent of £4 from one of the 10,000 dealers estimated to live in Odessa, Ukraine. You’re 18. You take it back to your parents’ flat and do it over the stove. Then you inject the corrosive brown brew into a vein. If you’re lucky you may have your own works, maybe even a clean set from the lady at the Faith Hope Love Centre. But you are just as likely to pass your syringe out to the needle-strewn waste ground to share with your mates. It’s a way to make the long cold evenings pass, and everyone does it, don’t they? It’s not like you’re a ‘narkoman’, a junkie. Your dad hits the vodka, you fix shirka. Only these days you are more than likely to be fixing HIV too.

a ‘nogi’ or drug runner (Russian for ‘legs’) waits for clients to arrive

HIV with the brakes off
All through the former Soviet empire, from St Petersburg and Estonia in the west, thousands of miles over to Irkutsk in Siberia, and throughout the Ukraine, young people are fixing up drugs and catching HIV.
As well as shirka, heroin of varying purity is widely available now: “I saw heroin use everywhere when I went to Russia this year,” says photographer John Ranard, whose pictures illustrate this piece.
“Different batches of widely different strengths appear unpredictably - which often leads to overdose.” But in the Caspian sea port of Astrakhan he saw people still fixing up home-made preparations of opium tar, there

called hanka.
The HIV rate in most of these countries has doubled every year for the last four years. In the