Lost generation: BBC Russian investigates Russia's mephedrone crisis
Cheap and easy to produce mephedrone, is now the most popular illegal drug in Russia. Growing numbers of young people are getting hooked, their lives ruined, but the police seem powerless to stop it.
By Anastasia Platonova.
Warning! This text contains details about drug use and production which some may find distressing
Russia is in the grip of a synthetic drugs epidemic which many are comparing to the fentanyl crisis in the USA. Growing numbers of young people – many still at school are both using and producing and supplying the synthetic drug mephedrone. Known as the ‘poor man’s cocaine’, mephedrone is cheap and easy to make. Russian police are fighting a losing battle to prevent supplies of precursors being smuggled in from China and distributed to a constantly replenishing chain of improvised labs across the country. BBC Russian and BBC Eye gained unique access to the entire chain of production, distribution, and consumption, revealing the damage this drug is wreaking on Russia’s younger generation.
“Dreams come true”
On 22 July 2023, 18-year-old Maxim (name changed) woke up in a rented apartment in the centre of a small town in southern Russia. By 10 in the morning, the sun was already shining brightly, and Maxim was late for work in a nearby café. The apartment was a mess: tables were covered with a jumble of rags, glass flasks, and plastic syringes; a pile of garbage bags sat in the corner; the kitchen was cluttered with boxes of baking soda mixed with empty vials.
Maxim was used to sleeping in his clothes without a blanket. Broad-shouldered and tall, with a close-cropped haircut and a heavy watch on his wrist, he looked older than his age. Jumping up quickly, he grabbed a lump of damp white powder, wrapped it in a striped towel, stuffed it into a sports bag, and left the apartment.
He peered out the stairwell window. Down in the courtyard, overgrown with hazel trees, he could see two men in tracksuits. Maxim hesitated — for weeks he had been plagued by constant paranoia: at night, nightmares tormented him that the apartment was about to be stormed. During the day, when leaving for work, he circled the block to make sure he wasn’t being followed.
But on the morning of 22 July, he was in a hurry and decided to ignore his fears, stepping quickly out of the building. Immediately, blows rained down on him; a bag was pulled over his head and he was shoved into a car. As he wrote later in his diary, being caught was actually a relief: “I relaxed. A long-awaited rest.” Left alone briefly in the car, Maxim began to sing words from a popular Soviet pop-song: “Dreams come true. And don’t come true… But all the good things are never forgotten.”
“I can make money out of this”
Over the next several months Maxim documented his life in two school exercise books which he later shared with the BBC. He called these diary-memoirs his “confession,” and on the title page of one notebook (the cover shows a ginger kitten cuddling a Teddy bear, playfully tilting its head) he wrote his alias: MANDRAGORA – a name taken from the Harry Potter books.
“It was a hard time for our family.” Maxim wrote. “We lived in poverty for a long while.”
The family moved from the Urals to a small town in southern Russia and began building a house. They had to sleep on jackets laid out on the concrete floor and heated themselves by burning planks left over from construction. “A year later my stepfather died, and we were left alone — me, my mother and my four-year-old sister.”
Tatyana, Maxim’s mother, worked as a nurse, but money was tight. Maxim “felt like a loser” compared with classmates who had “new clothes, phones and school lunches.” To earn some money he sold cigarettes individually, then decided to look for something more lucrative.
Realising there were no legal opportunities for work as a 15-year-old, Maxim moved his job search to the messenger app Telegram where in no time at all he came across adverts recruiting illegal drug couriers.
Drug dealing in Russia happens online and has become completely depersonalized: buyers are given coordinates to a stash (usually a small batch of drugs) and go to pick it up. Themselves. These stashes are made by a stashman, or kladman in Russian — who receives a wholesale supply from a dealer, breaks it into small portions and sends the coordinates to a curator, who then passes them on to the specific buyer.
Stashmen usually get paid for each drop (payments are sometimes made in cryptocurrency), but they risk far more than they earn. In Russia, stashmen are often young people who end up with long prison terms for just a handful of drops.
Maxim remembers his first experience as a stashman. He was told he would be sent the coordinates of a wholesale batch of drugs. His job was to retrieve it, divide it into smaller portions and then to hide them around the city. “I was sitting with a friend at the back of the class. He was doing his own class work and mine, while I sat sweating and trembling, waiting for the address. During the 4th lesson I got the address, and by the end of the 6th I was on the bus heading into town.”
The coordinates led him to a snow-covered wooded area. “I dug in the snow until dark, messaging my curator that I couldn’t find the stash. My phone was blowing up with calls from my mother, but the curator didn’t allow me to postpone the job until the next day, so I went home and that night I sneaked out again to make the drops.”
Maxim was paid 200–300 roubles (roughly £2.00-£3.00) for each stash. “It was stupid to work for that kind of money,” he reflected years later. But he was motivated not only by money, but also by the adrenaline rush of selling banned substances: “And I can make money out of this too? That was just ‘wow.’”
With the money he earned, he sometimes bought groceries for the house, and once he treated himself to a quality fur-trimmed coat. “For the first month that coat stayed in a bag under my bed,” Maxim recalls — he couldn’t explain to his mother where such an expensive thing had come from, so he was afraid to wear it around her.
Maxim kept at this work for a couple of years. By age 16, after finishing nine grades of school, he was working part-time as a sous chef when he saw that a drug seller was recruiting ‘chemists’ — people who could synthesize Russia’s most popular drug: mephedrone.
“Poor man’s cocaine”
Mephedrone first appeared in the early 2000s, when it was popularized by an Israeli chemist working under the pseudonym Dr Zee.
Mephedrone penetrates the brain faster than other synthetic drugs, producing euphoria, a surge of energy, sexual desire, and sociability — but it also wears off more quickly, causing a severe withdrawal syndrome (anxiety and depression) and, as a result, rapid addiction.
In 2010, Russia banned mephedrone and its components, but this did not stop its growing popularity, especially among teenagers. According to psychologist and rehabilitation centre staff member Irina Medved, as well as the director of another rehab centre interviewed by the BBC, children in Russia now try drugs as early as age 12, and by 14 many are already using mephedrone regularly.
Denis, a practicing narcologist and employee of a charity organization that works with drug users, stresses that dependence develops very quickly in teenagers, and without help they risk dying — whether by accident or suicide. At the same time, getting help is extremely difficult: addicted teenagers fall into a “grey zone.”
“We are losing an entire generation,” he warns.
It’s estimated that about one third of all illegal drugs sales in Russia now involve mephedrone.
The Russian research project DarkMetrics, monitors and studies activity on darknet marketplaces. Incredibly Russians buying drugs on these sites often leave reviews. The researchers looked at reviews posted on four popular marketplaces and found that in just one month one third of all the reviews (more than 300,000 posts) were for mephedrone. Since most users only leave feedback after their second or third purchase that means that the real number of mephedrone purchases every month on these four sites alone could be as high as 700,000.
Continuing their number crunching the researchers also took one random day in 2024 and counted the amount of mephedrone available for sale across Russia on the country’s two biggest darknet marketplaces. They found 617 kg worth of mephedrone on offer stored in ready-to-pick-up stashes in cities across the country - about a third of the total volume of all illegal substances on sale on the darknet on that particular day.
“A merciless drug”
Eighteen-year-old Olya has come to a Moscow lab to get tested for HIV and hepatitis. She’s carrying a backpack with a sweater for the evening, some makeup, and — always — a supply of clean syringes.
For the next 15 minutes, two nurses try unsuccessfully to find a vein in Olya’s arms; they manageto draw blood only after several attempts — the veins in her arms are almost collapsed from intravenous drug use.
Olya was first introduced to mephedrone at the age of 15 by her boyfriend. At the time, she was living on the outskirts of Moscow in a large family and was still in school. “It just opened up a whole new world.”
Within a couple of weeks, Olya was snorting mephedrone several times a week — it turned out her boyfriend was also dealing. She remembers the period of her life between ages 15 and 17 like this: she went without mephedrone “for at most a couple of days in a row.” Soon after, she dropped out of school and started to tusovat’sya — hanging out and partying.
At first, Olya liked her new life: “Everyone’s out there looking for money or for drugs. But I’ve got a guy who is dealing drugs. Well, that’s it, I’ll stick with him.”
But soon problems began — Olya’s boyfriend was arrested, while her dependence on mephedrone deepened: “I wasn’t using to get high anymore, but just to wake up. To get out of bed. To stay alive.”
To get money and mephedrone, Olya went to parties organized in Moscow chat groups where men invited girls to “snort together”. She would post on Telegram asking friends to come with her: “Girls, a guy invited me to a party, who wants to come with me? They’ll order us a taxi from my place.”
Things got even darker when a friend gave her contacts to a 60-year-old Moscow businessman. Before meeting, the man asked her seemingly innocent questions in chat: “Do you do well in school? What grade are you in? What do your parents do?” Olya’s friend insisted he just wanted to talk, but it quickly became clear what the man really wanted from 15-year-old Olya was sex.
“He would give me either mephedrone or money, which I then spent on mephedrone anyway.”
Olya met him several times: “I’d get loaded on drugs and go to him. Sober it was impossible.” Soon he suggested that Olya bring along some of her friends.
For every new girl, Olya says, she got a cut: “He wanted schoolgirls. I’d text this man that I could bring a girlfriend. — ‘Show me her photos. How old is she, where does she study?’ It was like a questionnaire. If he liked her he’d say: ‘Okay, come over.’ We’d go to him, there’d be sex, we’d take the cash and leave. Later I even started demanding a cut from the girls themselves — I wanted more drugs, and the prices kept rising. I’d lie on the bed, hold their hand and try to calm them, while in my head there was only one thought: ‘Just do your thing, I’ll take my money or my mephedrone. And you don’t interest me anymore.’”
“Mephedrone erases everything: your sense of worth, your self-respect, love for yourself, for your family, for your friends. Like if you took a cigarette butt and put it out on your own skin — you’d get a hole [in your flesh]. That’s what mephedrone does — it burns everything away. It’s a merciless drug,” Olya says.
In March 2023, Olya’s mother decided to send her 17-year-old daughter to rehab. “I looked like a skeleton, my nose was burned through [from the drugs], I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep — nothing interested me except the next dose,” she recalls. Olya spent seven months in a closed rehab centre, counting down the days until her release.
Four months after she got out, in March 2024, Olya got in contact with the BBC. She told us she had found a job. She said she had relapsed once but after that experience she had decided she was finished with mephedrone for good.
Unfortunately, it was not to last.
“Every schoolkid can cook it”
All the rehabilitation-centre staff and narcologists interviewed by the BBC agree on one thing: mephedrone is popular because it’s accessible and cheap — it’s easy to buy or, if you know where to look, you can even just find a stash hidden for someone else,
Mephedrone is also popular with producers because it’s cheap and simple to make. It costs between 30,000 to 150,000 roubles (£270 - £1,330), to produce a kilo of mephedrone, according to dealers who spoke to the BBC. The street value of one kilo of mephedrone is around two million roubles (£17,800) according to data from the DarkMetrics research group.
“To make other synthetic drugs you still need high precision and some expensive equipment,” says Nikolai (name changed) — a chemist who writes how-to guides for people learning how to ‘cook’ up synthetic drugs.
“Mephedrone became popular [with producers] because you could make it in the kitchen. Now any schoolkid can cook it.”
His view is echoed by Renat Kuramshin — a former investigator with the Ministry of Internal Affairs who has investigated large drug shipments into Russia: “We shut down big supplies of hashish. We shut down big supplies of heroin. Something had to replace them. And mephedrone came along. It’s an easily synthesized drug that can be produced anywhere from central Russia to beyond the Arctic Circle. You can set up labs anywhere and cook in peace.”
The BBC obtained access to a number of manuals for synthesizing mephedrone. They describe the production process in detail. “These instructions are aimed at a person who has done chemistry at school received a grade of three or higher,” says the introduction to one such 157-page manual.
The manual advises buying necessary chemicals in household-chemical stores or shops for home distillers (but in either case, it’s better not to draw attention), explains how to find private houses or apartments for labs, and gives step-by-step instructions on masking smells and disposing of liquid toxic waste (which, the authors complain, inexperienced cooks pour into the sewer).
It also offers general advice (the main one being — don’t use what you produce, and always have a reliable cover story for why you might be on a vacant lot at one in the morning: “needing to pee is also a legend”).
Despite all these precautions, mephedrone labs in Russia are shut down every two to three days — in 2024 alone more than 138 such laboratories were dismantled (about half of all drug labs closed by the law enforcement).
To start cooking, Maxim the sous chef ordered a basic kit for synthesizing mephedrone from one of the darknet marketplaces. These kits are called konstruktor because of the simplicity of production — the set contains several numbered vessels, and you just follow the instructions: “mix one and two, pour into three.”
“It’s like building a dragon out of LEGO. You don’t have extra pieces in a LEGO box, right? The kit has no extra parts either. And by following the instructions you’ll assemble mephedrone from the reagents,” Maxim explains. He told the BBC that the kit was sent to him to be picked up at a regular parcel collection point in a supermarket.
The young man decided to cook drugs in an abandoned bathhouse — he checked that there was electricity, set up the flasks, and began following the instructions. But he did something wrong, and a flask exploded during the reaction, spilling reagents outside.
“The bath house became deadly dangerous to be in. My body was burning, my eyes refused to open, and my nose could no longer breathe.” Running outside, Maxim lost control of his bowels and felt very nauseous. “I thought I was going to die,” he recalls in diaries he handed over to BBC. On the way home in the bus, Maxim noticed that passengers were turning away from him because of the smell.
The next experiments also failed, and only on the fourth or fifth attempt did Maxim manage to synthesize mephedrone. “And those hundred grams sold out very quickly,” the young man recalls. “[Synthesizing drugs] — it’s not scary at all. It’s just that you don’t understand what you’re actually doing. Here it says: mix one and three. So you mix one and three. I had this youthful maximalism. I didn’t understand what it could lead to. I even created a channel and showed my successes online.”
BBC asked Maxim if he felt any responsibility for the fact that many of his peers became dependent on the mephedrone he produced.
“So what? I also became addicted to mephedrone,” Maxim quickly replied. “I don’t blame some dealer who sold it to me when I was 15. It’s everyone’s own business. Everyone decides whether to use it or not. Whether to put a cross over their own life or not.”
By the age of 17, Maxim was leading a double life — living in a rented apartment and working as a (real) cook in a café. In the mornings, he would go to work, and by noon he would return home and start cooking mephedrone: he moved the laboratory from the abandoned bathhouse to the rented apartment, where he installed a ventilation system and sealed the door gaps to hide the strong smell of the chemical reaction. In one room he would set up the large flask where the reaction took place; the process took about 12 hours, so by morning Maxim was free again to head off to his legal job.
At work, people noticed a strange smell from the young man and asked what it was — Maxim referred to it as some chemical work being done in his residential block of flats. He explained the smell to his mother by saying that he left clothes next to vegetables at work. Tatyana (his mother) visited his apartment more than once but noticed nothing suspicious.
But his double life was beginning to take its toll.
“Once a week I dreamed that I was being arrested. I would wake up in a cold sweat, flush everything down the toilet, and break the flasks.”
When asked why he still continued synthesizing drugs, Maxim, after a slight pause, quickly answered: “It’s also like drugs. You sell once. You realise you can make money from it. You realise it brings adrenaline, new emotions…When you’ve been doing it for a long time, dependence appears, and it’s already hard for you to stop yourself internally and say: ‘No, that’s it, we’re not selling drugs.’ That doesn’t happen. It’s as if something inside you drives you to do it.”
In his diary, Maxim was more direct: “Drug trafficking is my addiction, without it I start going through withdrawal.”
How raw materials for the drug are reaching Russia
On a sunny Saturday in a town outside Russia, 17‑year‑old Dan (name changed) is sitting on the balcony of a rented apartment vaping and checking his phone constantly. He’s wearing an immaculately-ironed white shirt and is sipping a non-alcoholic beer.
Dan works for a business on the darknet coordinating the supply of raw materials, chemicals, and equipment for drug production. On the day the BBC met him he was remotely overseeing the production of mephedrone — advising the ‘chemists’ who were supposed to carry out the work.
While we were speaking to him he was getting regular calls from people inside Russia checking details of how to ‘cook’ mephedrone. He showed us some of the conversations. Before meeting Dan, BBC reporters spent months talking to him and verifying that he was indeed involved in supplying raw materials and producing drugs.
During one of the calls that day, the ‘chemists’ were complaining about leaking equipment. The internet connection was unstable and eventually the line went dead. Dan was left guessing - maybe the police arrived, maybe they were overwhelmed by fumes, or maybe their phone just ran out of battery.
Dan says little about himself: he is not yet 18, but he has already been in the drug business for several years. One of the main challenges, he says is the supply of precursors for mephedrone to Russia. There are two which each cost between 18–40 thousand roubles (£160-£355) per kilogram. The main difficulty is not the price, but the import process: since 2022, both substances have been included in the list of drug precursors, and their circulation is now very restricted.
Renat Kuramshin, a former investigator with Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, says illegal drug producers in Russia now have two options for obtaining precursors: legal chemical production in Russia (but this option has its drawbacks — law enforcement closely monitors precursors used in legal industry, so any “leak” of precursors to illegal use will immediately arouse suspicion), or importing from China.
The Chinese route mirrors the way the precursors for the synthetic opioid fentanyl are being smuggled into the US – with packages hidden in high volume legal Chinese imports – often with the collusion of both Chinese and Mexican organised crime groups. In 2022, fentanyl use in the U.S. resulted in 73,654 deaths — eight people per hour.
Drug traffickers in Russia are using exactly the same scheme, the BBC has discovered.
“In China chemical production is developed,” former narcotics detective Renat explains, drawing maps on a school exercise book. “They produce not only common chemicals, but also precursors for narcotics. But the border checkpoints between China and Russia are well known and controlled. It’s dangerous to transport directly.”
“In China, a batch is prepared, disguised as legal goods that at first glance will not arouse suspicion from law enforcement. They go where there is less inspection, so they bring all this into Kazakhstan.”
Since Kazakhstan and Russia are part of Eurasia Customs Union, Renat continues, “there is practically no border,” and then “the batch is distributed”. Some of it is stored in Moscow, which acts as a logistics hub for supplies, and the rest is sent directly to the regions.
Dan, the importer, confirms that he buys in precursors from China disguised as other legal chemicals — for example, pesticides: “Completely legal logistics are used. A truck carrying the precursors from China could be bringing in anything from sneakers to vibrators,” he says.
The BBC also gained access to a closed chat of wholesale drug traffickers where the synthesis and supply of precursors were discussed. The BBC monitored the chat for more than six months: users congratulated each other on national holidays, griped about unreliable suppliers and personnel shortages, and periodically discussed precursor deliveries. According to the correspondence, the “standard route” for delivering precursors is from China via Kazakhstan.
To confirm the route and method of delivery, posing as a buyer, the BBC contacted several Chinese factories that sell fentanyl precursors. In particular — the Amarvel Bio factory, some of whose representatives were arrested in Fiji in 2023, and extradited to the US on charges of money laundering and trafficking fentanyl precursors. Soon after, the same factory started expanding its focus to Russia, actively advertising and targeting buyers of mephedrone precursors.
A BBC reporter contacted the factory posing as a buyer, the factory representatives assured that delivery would be carried out safely and sent a tracking number for the cargo, which, according to them, had already been sent to a client in Russia. This cargo also passed through Kazakhstan. Other factories also sent the BBC correspondent tracking numbers for shipments, and these deliveries were also carried out through Kazakhstan.
Representatives of the Amarvel Bio factory sent the BBC a photo of a storage facility where, according to them, the cargo could be picked up. The photo showed a yellow portable building, in front of which were boxes wrapped in yellow tape. In October 2023, the BBC was able to geolocate this photo — the portable building is located on the territory of the ‘Yuzhnye Vorota’ (Southern Gates) market in Moscow.
And in January 2024, ‘Yuzhnye Vorota’ was mentioned in correspondence among drug traffickers in a closed chat — according to participants, arrests became more frequent there when couriers came to collect precursors.
‘Yuzhnye Vorota’ in publications about goods delivery from China is called a “centre of ‘grey’ customs clearance.” In the constant flow of goods from China and Kazakhstan a barrel with precursors can easily be hidden.
Renat Kuramshin confirms that such markets can be widely used by drug manufacturers and suppliers: “Every such market is a city within a city, where anything can be hidden — from a luxury car to a tonne of heroin or mephedrone,” he says, standing about a hundred meters from the yellow portable building whose photo was sent to the BBC correspondent by employees of the Amarvel Bio factory. Behind Renat, boxes wrapped in yellow tape are being actively unloaded.
‘Yuzhnye Vorota’ is owned by the influential Moscow-based entrepreneur God Nisanov, who also owns the ‘Sadovod’ market and the ‘Moscow’ trade fair complex. According to reports in the Russian news online news outlet ‘Baza’ the ‘Moscow’ trade complex has also been used as an endpoint for precursor deliveries from China. The management of ‘Yuzhnye Vorota’ did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.
Dan, the supplier, told the BBC that for drug traffickers ‘Yuzhnye Vorota’ is a favoured destination because it is easy to hide barrels of precursors in the nearby forest for producers and couriers to collect.
To show us the system Dan sends an instruction to a courier in Moscow— telling them that several barrels of precursors have been left for them to pick up under a big fir tree in woods near the highway, 60 kilometres from the Moscow Ring Road.
As we are talking to Dan, the ‘chemists’ he had been in touch with in Russia get back in contact. He’s obviously relieved that this particular strand of his business model is safe for now, but he acknowledges that everyone gets caught in the end. They’ll probably last three or four years,” he says. Almost all of them start off just wanting to earn money and then leave, but the environment pulls them in — “you want more, and life changes”. Cooking can bring in up to 200 thousand [roubles, £1780] at a time.”
— Do you feel responsible for selling drugs?
— Well, I’m not running around playgrounds with a syringe anymore.
— So what? It destroys people’s lives.
— I don’t really care. People sell tobacco, alcohol, and so on.
— Yeah, alcohol is quite a destructive substance too.
— Yeah, my dad drank himself into ruin.
— So you’ve personally felt how destructive addiction can be. And now you act, in a sense, as a sponsor of addiction for others. Don’t you see a contradiction there?
— Not at all.
— Why not?
— Well, back then alcohol companies made money, now it’s me.
Mephedrone to opiates
Back in Moscow, and after just a few months clean, Olya has relapsed.
She began by injecting mephedrone intravenously — to achieve a stronger effect. But then one night at a party with friends, realising mephedrone wasn’t giving her the same high it used to, she decided to try heroin instead.
The following morning her friends found Olya “on a mattress, blue with a bloody mouth.” A 17‑year‑old boy sleeping on a nearby mattress had died.
After that incident, Olya and her friend were called into the police station for questioning. “We haven’t even been in school for a long time,” the 18‑year‑old girl explained in response to the officers’ questions.
Dying doesn’t seem scary
After the party, Olya thought about it — she too could have died that night: “But they revived me? [So] let’s just keep going.”
By the summer of 2024, Olya had switched to the heroin substitute methadone, which she used intravenously.
She posted videos about her life. In one she is staggering through a Moscow metro underpass in high heels, clearly high. She is wearing a white faux-fur coat, her bright pink eyeshadow contrasting with her deathly pale face.
“Let’s shoot up again? she asks the friend filming her. “Shall we?”
The BBC caught up with her one evening as she was walking through a park. Still slightly sleepy after a party the night before, she describes how she and her friends stroll through the city looking for drug stashes — “you just have to look where stashers usually hide things”.
“I don’t even like Moscow. There are so many drugs here. So many temptations,” she says. Olya speaks of her plans to leave the city to stay with her grandmother in Vladimir and try to come off drugs there. But it never happens.
After walking in the park, Olya returns to her friend’s apartment — in one room blood-stained mattresses are piled up, in the corner there is a basin with dried vomit or blood. In the grim kitchen, with walls yellowed from cigarette smoke Olya and her friend Vlad make instant noodles and try to remember where they put the money they’ve put by for their next hit.
By the evening they still haven’t found it so they decide to go for a walk in a nearby park to see if they can find any stashes hidden there.
“Honestly, I’ve been thinking that I just want to throw myself out a window, just to forget all of this, for none of it to exist,” Olya says. “I do want to live — but dying doesn’t seem scary either. I’m grabbing onto anything I can.”
“It’s impossible to stop”
In the summer of 2023, Maxim was arrested — the two guys in tracksuits who had been watching his building turned out to be police operatives. During the search of his rented apartment, they found synthesizing equipment, 700 grams of mephedrone, precursor remnants, and several bank cards. Maxim and his partner were sent to a pre-trial detention centre.
“When I was arrested, I felt so relieved,” Maxim recalls. “My head was overloaded. I had to go to work, prep food at the restaurant, pay rent...” In detention, Maxim started keeping a journal, which he later gave to BBC correspondent.
“A grey winter sky hung over the city. The air was enriched with the sharp taste of freedom, and outside, a light rain began to fall. In the distance, the streetlights flickered,” Maxim wrote, lying on his bunk in the cell.
Relations with his cellmates were tense — the young man was forced to do dirty work in the cell, and they reproached him for producing drugs. On days when the pressure from his cellmates intensified, Maxim’s journal entries became more emotional: “My consciousness has shrunk to 4 meters wide and 10 meters long. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. It kind of feels like a dorm: TV, phone, fan, kettle. All the conditions for living — but it’s impossible to live.”
His mother, Tatyana (name changed), tried to find an answer while her son was in detention — why had he spent several years distributing drugs?
“He saw how hard his mother worked and how little she earned. And how much you could make just by going and leaving a stash under a bench somewhere. After trying easy money, it became hard for him to stop,” she says.
One day, while shopping for T-shirts, Tatyana caught a familiar scent — the same smell Maxim used to have when he made up excuses. In front of her stood a young man picking out a flashy tracksuit, and Tatyana realized: he was a cook (someone who synthesizes drugs). She wanted to approach him, tell him about her son, and say: “Stop.” But looking at his “satisfied face,” she understood — “no pleas from a stranger’s mother” would make a difference.
“My son is gone — and two hundred others have taken his place. This will never end,” she says.
“Lost generation”
In detention, Maxim was thinking through possible ways to “escape from prison” — he was facing a long sentence, which meant he wouldn’t be released until he was nearly 30.
“Who needs a guy who’s been in prison, has no education, and spent half his life behind bars?” he wrote.
To avoid serving the full sentence, Maxim decided to sign a contract with the Ministry of Defence and go to fight in Ukraine. When his accomplice Nikita found out that Maxim was planning to sign the contract, he sent him a note from the neighbouring cell: “Brother, if you’re going to the special military operation [SVO – Russia’s official name for its war in Ukraine], maybe you could take all the blame, so I get a lighter sentence. You’re going to the SVO anyway, and there it doesn’t matter how long your sentence is.”
In January 2024, Maxim, who had entered a pre-trial agreement, was released from detention and placed under house arrest.
Before the ankle monitor was installed, he was free to move around the city. Standing in the forest where he had once found his first stash, wearing a balaclava and a hoodie with a darknet shop logo, he recorded himself on video: “I would’ve ended up in prison sooner or later anyway. We know what we’re getting into. But 12 years — that’s a lot.”
His mother told the BBC that Maxim signed the military contract in July. In August, his fellow soldiers informed her that Maxim may have died during a combat mission.
By autumn 2024, Maxim’s official status was “missing in action.” Nikita, Maxim’s partner in crime, according to Nikita’s father, was also planning to sign a contract and go to war.
At a meeting with BBC correspondents, Maxim’s mother read his journals for the first time and began to understand the deep despair her son was feeling.
“A lost generation. We didn’t know what to do. Deception all around […] I lost everything because of these drugs, because of insomnia and endless work. I let down my family, I let down my mother. I let down my sister, I let down everyone. I said it couldn’t get any worse. But it did. […] The guilt I feel toward my family is endless. I’ll never be able to make up for it. Will I get a chance? I’m in deep trouble.”
Back in Moscow, in the autumn of 2024, Olya was using heroin again.
She bought drugs using money awarded to her as moral compensation — the man who had sex with Olya in exchange for money or drugs was arrested and prosecuted. Olya was also considered a suspect because she had brought her friends to this man and took a cut from them, but she wasn’t charged since she was under 18 at the time of the crime.
In November 2024, she was detained and put under house arrest.
In May 2025, she was sentenced to six years in a penal colony for attempting to sell drugs.
Olya’s mother declined to speak with the BBC.
In December 2024, Dan got back in touch with the BBC.
He said the chemists he had been calling during our earlier meeting were now in prison, but that he was now running a much larger lab capable of producing mephedrone on an industrial scale. He even sent a video referring to production cycles of several kilos of the drug at a time.
More money for the suppliers and dealers. More broken lives and more misery for families across Russia.
The BBC asked the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs to comment on the scale of illegal mephedrone trafficking and precursor supply. We did not receive a reply.
Read this story in Russian here.
English version edited by Jenny Norton.
‘Made with hate’: Why Russian teenagers are joining neo-Nazi groups
Researchers report a spike in far-right violence this year, but say many self-styled neo-Nazis seem more motivated by social media hype than ideology.
Wow!
Over in Russia they face the same problems we do in America. Fentanyl addiction. This article had me crying. So many lives lost.
I hate drugs!