MOSCOW, November 23 (Itar-Tass) — The Russian State Duma lower parliament house support the idea about a new system of anti-drug law that was voiced by head of the country’s anti-drug authority Viktor Ivanov.
Ivanov spoke on Thursday at a roundtable meeting at the State Duma dedicated to problems of legal backing of the national system of social rehabilitation of drug abusers. According to Ivanov, the rehabilitation scheme has no legal backing.
“There is an optimistic declaration: ‘The state guarantees narcological assistance to drug addicts.’ But how this assistance is to be offered? What the guarantees that it is for real that it is not another deception? There is nothing of the kind,” he stressed.
“We badly need legislative initiatives to legalize the existing advanced rehabilitation practices,” he said. “There there can be three possible strategies. The first one is to pass a separate federal law on social rehabilitation and re-socialization. The second one is to cardinally review the existing basic law on drugs and psychotropic substances. And the third strategy is to develop a simple and clear anti-drug code.”
“Each of these strategies has its pluses and minuses, and I would like you to discuss them all. We must have a simple and clear scheme for any person in a difficult situation, for his or her family and relatives. Now people have nowhere to go,” he noted.
“It would be right to set up a working group at the State Duma from members of secotral committee to work on amendments on a permanent basis,” said Andrei Isayev, the chairman of the State Duma committee on labor, social policy and veteran affairs.
“A set of laws will be needed that will concern various spheres in order to work out in the long run an anti-drug code, or a systemic document to regulate this kind of work,” he stressed.