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Drugs in socialist Czechoslovakia
Kolář, Jan ; Pullmann, Michal (advisor) ; Nožina, Miroslav (referee) ; Vaněk, Miroslav (referee)
The issue of drugs and drug addiction is one of the greatest unresolved (and probably unresolvable) problems of mankind. This topic encountered a rocket rise in the Czech environment especially after the Velvet Revolution. The problem itself, nevertheless, germinated in the times of Communist dictatorship. For ideological reasons, however, it has long been trivialized, concealed, or attributed to the "decadent West" and to its affiliated domestic "elements". Serious drug-related debates took place in the Normalization period almost exclusively on the pages of professional publications and magazines kept from the eyes of ordinary citizen. The topic of drug addiction began to penetrate the public space without the old ideological templates in the second half of the 1980s, in connection with liberalization after the inauguration of M.S. Gorbachev into the leader of Communists in the Soviet Union. Regardless of the "wishes and complaints" of the Communist establishment, a subculture of young drug addicts emerged in Czechoslovakia, which had its values, hierarchies, symbols and its problems too. In the 1980s, several tens of thousands of people were involved, and if we add several hundreds of thousands elderly people who abused psychotropic medications, we find out how a major problem it was in the...
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