Effort to Expose Russia’s ‘Troll Army’ Draws Vicious Retaliation

By ANDREW HIGGINS NY TIMES

Jessikka Aro, right, a journalist in Finland, was harassed after reporting on the rise of abusive pro-Russian posts on the Internet. Credit James Hill for The New York Times

HELSINKI, Finland — Seeking to shine some light into the dark world of Internet trolls, a journalist with Finland’s national broadcaster asked members of her audience to share their experience of encounters with Russia’s “troll army,” a raucous and often venomous force of online agitators.

The response was overwhelming, though not in the direction that the journalist, Jessikka Aro, had hoped.

As she expected, she received some feedback from people who had clashed with aggressively pro-Russian voices online. But she was taken aback, and shaken, by a vicious retaliatory campaign of harassment and insults against her and her work by those same pro-Russian voices.

“Everything in my life went to hell thanks to the trolls,” said Ms. Aro, a 35-year-old investigative reporter with the social media division of Finland’s state broadcaster, Yle Kioski.

Abusive online harassment is hardly limited to pro-Russian Internet trolls. Ukraine and other countries at odds with the Kremlin also have legions of aggressive avengers on social media.

But pro-Russian voices have become such a noisy and disruptive presence that both NATO and the European Union have set up special units to combat what they see as a growing threat not only to civil discourse but to the well-being of Europe’s democratic order and even to its security.

This “information war,” said Rastislav Kacer, a veteran diplomat who served as Slovakia’s ambassador to Washington and at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels, “is just part of a bigger struggle.” While not involving bloodshed, he added, it “is equally as dangerous as more conventional hostile action.”

For Ms. Aro, the abuse increased sharply last year when, following up on reports in the opposition Russian news media, she visited St. Petersburg to investigate the workings of a Russian “troll factory.” The big office churns out fake news and comment, particularly on Ukraine, and floods websites and social media with denunciations of Russia’s critics.

In response to her reporting, pro-Russian activists in Helsinki organized a protest outside the headquarters of Yle, accusing it of being a troll factory itself. Only a handful of people showed up.

At the same time, Ms. Aro has been peppered with abusive emails, vilified as a drug dealer on social media sites and mocked as a delusional bimbo in a music video posted on YouTube.

“There are so many layers of fakery you get lost,” said Ms. Aro, who was awarded the Finnish Grand Prize for Journalism in March.

As Ms. Aro’s experiences illustrate, Finland, a country at the center of Russia’s concerns about NATO’s expansion toward its borders, has emerged as a particularly active front in the information wars. A member of the European Union with an 830-mile-long border with Russia, Finland has stayed outside the United States-led military alliance but, unnerved by Russian military actions in Ukraine and its saber-rattling in the Baltic Sea, has expanded cooperation with NATO and debated whether to apply for full membership.

Public opinion is deeply divided, making Finland a prime target for a campaign by Russia.

“Their big thing is to keep Finland out of NATO,” said Saara Jantunen, a researcher at the Finnish Defense Forces in Helsinki, who last year published a book in Finland entitled “Info-War.” She said that she, too, had been savaged on social media, sometimes by the same and apparently fake commentators who have hounded Ms. Aro.

“They fill the information space with so much abuse and conspiracy talk that even sane people start to lose their minds,” she added.

Europe’s main response so far has been to try to counter outright lies. In November, the European Union launched “Disinformation Review,” a weekly compendium of pro-Kremlin distortions and untruths.

But facts have been powerless against a torrent of abuse and ridicule targeted at European journalists, researchers and others labeled NATO stooges.

Pro-Russian activists insist that they are merely exercising their right to free speech, and that they do not take money or instructions from Moscow.

The most abusive messages against Ms. Aro were mostly sent anonymously or from accounts set up under fake names on Facebook and other social media.

One of her most vocal critics in Finland, however, has openly declared his identity. He is Johan Backman, a tireless supporter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia who highlights the blurred lines between state-sponsored harassment and the expression of strongly held personal views.

Fluent in Russian, Mr. Backman now spends much of his time in Moscow, appearing regularly in the Russian news media and at conferences in Russia as “a human rights defender.” He also serves as the representative in Northern Europe for the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, a state-funded research group led by a Soviet-era intelligence officer.

Mr. Backman, who also represents the Donetsk People’s Republic, the breakaway state set up with Russian support in eastern Ukraine, denied targeting Ms. Aro as part of any “information war.” Rather, he insisted that Russia was itself the victim of a campaign of disinformation and distortion conducted by the West.

In a recent interview in Moscow, he said that Ms. Aro was part of this campaign and that she had tried to curtail the freedom of speech of Russia’s supporters in Finland by labeling them as “Russian trolls.” All the same, Mr. Backman added, her complaints about being targeted for abuse “have been very beneficial for Russia” because they have made others think twice about criticizing Moscow.

“She says she is a victim, and nobody wants to be a victim,” he said. “This changed the atmosphere in the journalistic community.”

Mr. Backman said he used his own private means to fund his activities in support of what he described as an “entirely defensive” campaign by Russia to counter Western propaganda. His activities, however, invariably follow Moscow’s political and geopolitical script, particularly on NATO, which he regularly denounces as a tool for United States military occupation.

It was intended as a bulwark against Soviet influence in Europe and committed members to collective defense policies.

Article 5 of the treaty states that an attack on one ally is an attack on all. It was invoked for the first time after Sept. 11, 2001.

Aside from NATO, Mr. Backman’s biggest bugbear of late has been Ms. Aro and the “Russo-phobic” tendencies that she, in his view, represents.

Just days after Ms. Aro made her first appeal in September 2014 for information about Russian trolls, Mr. Backman told Russian People’s Line, a nationalist Russian website, and other media that she was a “well-known assistant of American and Baltic special services.”

Around the same time, she received a call late at night on her cellphone from a number in Ukraine. Nobody spoke, and all she could hear was gunfire. This was followed by text and email messages denouncing her as a “NATO whore” and a message purporting to come from her father — who died 20 years ago — saying he was “watching her.”

The hardest blow, Ms. Aro said, came early this year when a Finnish-language news site, MVLehti.net, which is based in Spain and mostly focuses on vilifying immigrants, dug up and published court records that showed she had been convicted of using illegal amphetamines in 2004. She had been fined 300 euros.

The website’s headline: “NATO’s information expert Jessikka Aro turned out to be a convicted drug dealer.” It also posted photographs of Ms. Aro dancing in a slinky outfit at a nightclub in Bangkok.

Mr. Backman requested and received Ms. Aro’s old case file from the court shortly before the website published the documents. He denied passing them on to the site.

The false claim that Ms. Aro was a drug dealer triggered an unusual open letter signed by more than 20 Finnish editors infuriated by what they denounced as the “poisoning of public debate” with “insults, defamation and outright lies.” The Finnish police began an investigation into the website for harassment and hate speech.

“I don’t know if these people are acting on orders from Russia, but they are clearly what Lenin called ‘useful idiots,’” said Mika Pettersson, the editor of Finland’s national news agency and an organizer of the editors’ open letter. “They are playing into Putin’s pocket. Nationalist movements in Finland and other European countries want to destabilize the European Union and NATO, and this goes straight into Putin’s narrative.”

Ilja Janitskin, the founder and head of MVLehti, who is based in Barcelona, Spain, said in response to emailed questions that he had no connection with Russia other than his surname. His political views, he said, are closer to those of Donald J. Trump, not Mr. Putin.

He added that he had become interested in Ms. Aro only after she accused his website of “distributing Russian propaganda.”

Like Mr. Backman, he denied receiving any money from Russian sources, insisting that his website, which in just 18 months has become one of Finland’s most widely read online news sources, finances itself from advertising and donations by readers.

Ms. Aro acknowledged that she had used amphetamines regularly in her early 20s but dismissed as a “total lie” claims that she had been or is a drug dealer.

“They get inside your head, and you start thinking: If I do this, what will the trolls do next?” she said.

From Second-Hand Time

 by Svetlana Alexievich

Translated by Bela Shayevich From London Times Literary Supplement

A citizen of Belarus who was born in Ukraine and writes in Russian, Svetlana Alexievich takes as her subject the “history of the Russian-Soviet soul”. Second-Hand Time is the concluding book in a cycle of five, “The Red Man. Voices of Utopia”. Gathered from interviews carried out between 1991 and 2012, Second-Hand Time will appear in English for the first time later this month, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. Our first extract comes from the short opening section, in which the author addresses the reader in her own voice. The second, a complete chapter, suggests the breadth of Alexievich’s canvas and the originality of her method. “I am often told, even now, that what I write isn’t literature, it’s a document. What is literature today? Who can answer that question? We live faster than ever before. Content ruptures form. Breaks and changes it […] There are no borders between fact and fabrication, one flows into the other” (Nobel Lecture, 2015).

Remarks from an accomplice

We’re paying our respects to the Soviet era. Cutting ties with our old life. I’m trying to honestly hear out all the participants of the socialist drama…

Communism had an insane plan: to remake the ‘old breed of man’, ancient Adam. And it really worked … Perhaps it was communism’s only achievement. Seventy-plus years in the Marxist-Leninist laboratory gave rise to a new man: Homo sovieticus. Some see him as a tragic figure, others call him a sovok [1]. I feel like I know this person; we’re very familiar, we’ve lived side by side for a long time. I am this person. And so are my acquaintances, my closest friends, my parents. For a number of years, I travelled throughout the former Soviet Union – Homo sovieticus isn’t just Russian, he’s Belorussian, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Kazakh. Although we now all live in separate countries and speak different languages, you couldn’t mistake us for anyone else. We’re easy to spot! People who have come out of socialism are both like and unlike the rest of humanity – we have our own lexicon, our own conceptions of good and evil, our heroes and martyrs. We have a special relationship with death. The stories people tell me are full of jarring terms: ‘shoot’, ‘execute’, ‘liquidate’, ‘eliminate’, or typically Soviet varieties of disappearance such as ‘arrest’, ‘ten years without the right of correspondence’ [2], and ‘emigration’. How much can we value human life when we know that not long ago, people died by the millions? We’re full of hatred and superstitions. All of us come from the land of the Gulag and harrowing war. Collectivization, dekulakization [3], mass deportations of various nationalities…

This was socialism, but it was also just everyday life. Back then, we didn’t talk about it very much. Now that the world has transformed irreversibly, everyone is suddenly interested in that old life of ours – whatever it may have been like, it was our life. In writing, I’m piecing together the history of ‘domestic’, ‘interior’ socialism. As it existed in a person’s soul. I’ve always been drawn to this miniature expanse: one person, the individual. It’s where everything really happens.

Why does this book have so many stories of suicides instead of more typical Soviets with typically Soviet life stories? When it comes down to it, people end their lives for love, from fear of old age, or just out of curiosity, from a desire to come face to face with the mystery of death. I sought out people who had been permanently bound to the Soviet idea, letting it penetrate them so deeply, there was no separating them: the state had become their entire cosmos, blocking out everything else, even their own lives. They couldn’t just walk away from History, leaving it all behind and learning to live without it – diving head first into the new way of life and dissolving into private existence, like so many others who now allowed what used to be minor details to become their big picture. Today, people just want to live their lives, they don’t need some great idea. This is entirely new for Russia; it’s unprecedented in Russian literature. At heart, we’re built for war. We were always either fighting or preparing to fight. We’ve never known anything else – hence our wartime psychology. Even in civilian life, everything was always militarized. The drums were beating, the banners flying, our hearts leaping out of our chests. People didn’t recognize their own slavery – they even liked being slaves. I remember it well: after we finished school, we’d volunteer to go on class trips to the Virgin Lands4 and we’d look down on the students who didn’t want to come. We were bitterly disappointed that the Revolution and Civil War had all happened before our time. Now you wonder: was that really us? Was that me? I reminisced alongside my protagonists. One of them said, ‘Only a Soviet can understand another Soviet.’ We share a communist collective memory. We’re neighbours in memory. […]

The Soviet civilization… I’m rushing to make impressions of its traces, its familiar faces. I don’t ask people about socialism, I want to know about love, jealousy, childhood, old age. Music, dances, hairdos. The myriad sundry details of a vanished way of life. It’s the only way to chase the catastrophe into the contours of the ordinary and try to tell a story. Make some small discovery. It never ceases to amaze me how interesting everyday life really is. There are an endless number of human truths. History is concerned solely with the facts; emotions are outside of its realm of interest. In fact, it’s considered improper to admit feelings into history. But I look at the world as a writer and not a historian. I am fascinated by people. […]

I asked everyone I met what ‘freedom’ meant. Fathers and children had very different answers. Those who were born in the USSR and those born after its collapse do not share a common experience – it’s like they’re from different planets.

For the fathers, freedom is the absence of fear; the three days in August when we defeated the putsch. A man with his choice of a hundred kinds of salami is freer than one who only has ten to choose from. Freedom is never being flogged, although no generation of Russians has yet avoided a flogging. Russians don’t understand freedom, they need the Cossack and the whip.

For the children: freedom is love; inner freedom is an absolute value. Freedom is when you’re not afraid of your own desires; having lots of money so that you’ll have everything; it’s when you can live without having to think about freedom. Freedom is normal. […]

From a conversation with a university professor: ‘At the end of the nineties, my students would laugh when I told them stories about the Soviet Union. They were positive that a new future awaited them. Now, it’s a different story… Today’s students have truly seen and felt capitalism: the inequality, the poverty, the shameless wealth. They’ve witnessed the lives of their parents, who never got anything out of the plundering of our country. And they’re oriented toward radicalism. They dream of their own revolution, they wear red T-shirts with pictures of Lenin and Che Guevara.’

There’s a new demand for everything Soviet. For the cult of Stalin. Half of the people between the ages of nineteen and thirty consider Stalin an ‘unrivalled political figure’. A new cult of Stalin, in a country where he murdered at least as many people as Hitler?! Everything Soviet is back in style. ‘Soviet-style cafés’ with Soviet names and Soviet dishes. ‘Soviet’ candy and ‘Soviet’ salami, their taste and smell all too familiar from childhood. And of course, ‘Soviet’ vodka. There are dozens of Soviet-themed TV shows, scores of websites devoted to Soviet nostalgia. You can visit Stalin’s camps – on Solovki, in Magadan – as a tourist. The adverts promise that for the full effect, they’ll give you a camp uniform and a pickaxe. They’ll show you the newly restored barracks. Afterwards, there will be fishing…

Old-fashioned ideas are back in style: the great empire, the ‘iron hand’, the ‘special Russian path’. They brought back the Soviet national anthem; there’s a new Komsomol, only now it’s called Nashi [5]; there’s a ruling party, and it runs the country by the Communist Party playbook; the Russian president is just as powerful as the general secretary used to be, which is to say he has absolute power. Instead of Marxism-Leninism, there’s Russian Orthodoxy…

On the eve of the 1917 Revolution, Alexander Grin wrote, ‘And the future seems to have stopped standing in its proper place.’ Now, a hundred years later, the future is, once again, not where it ought to be. Our time comes to us second-hand.

The barricades are a dangerous place for an artist. They’re a trap. They ruin your vision, narrow your pupils, drain the world of its true colours. On the barricades, everything is black and white. You can’t see individuals, all you see are black dots: targets. I’ve spent my entire life on the barricades, and I would like to leave them behind. I want to learn how to enjoy life. To get back my normal vision. But today, tens of thousands of people are once again taking to the streets. They’re taking each other by the hand and tying white ribbons onto their jackets – a symbol of rebirth and light. And I’m with them.

I recently saw some young men in T-shirts with hammers and sickles and portraits of Lenin on them. Do they know what communism is?

On a stranger’s grief that God has deposited on your doorstep

Ravshan, migrant worker, 27 years old

AS TOLD BY GAFKHAR DZHURAYEVA, DIRECTOR OF MOSCOW’S TAJIKISTAN FUND

‘A man without his homeland is like a nightingale without a garden’

I know so much about death. Some day, the things I know will drive me insane…

The body is a vessel for the soul. A home. According to Muslim custom, a body must be buried as quickly as possible, preferably the same day, as soon as Allah has taken the soul. In the house of the deceased, we hang a scrap of white cloth from a nail, and it stays there for forty days. At night, the soul flies home and perches on the cloth. It listens to familiar voices and feels glad. Then it flies back.

Ravshan… I remember him well… the usual story…They hadn’t been paid in six months. He had four kids back in the Pamir region, then his father got very sick. He went to the construction bureau, asked for an advance, and they refused him. That was the last straw. He went out onto the porch and slit his own throat with a knife. They called me… I went down to the morgue… That strikingly handsome face… unforgettable. His face… We took up a collection. It’s still a mystery to me, the workings of this inner mechanism: nobody has a kopeck to spare, but if somebody dies they’ll instantly raise the necessary amount, people will give the last of whatever they have to help the person get buried at home and rest in their native soil. So that they won’t have to remain on foreign soil. For that, they’ll give away their last hundred roubles. If you tell them that someone needs to go home, you’ll get nothing; say a child is sick, they refuse; but if there’s been a death, here you go. They gathered all those crumpled hundred-rouble bills in a plastic bag and brought them to me, placed them on my desk. I took the money down to an Aeroflot ticket office. To the manager. The soul will fly home of its own accord, but shipping a coffin is pretty expensive.

[She picks up a stack of papers from her desk and begins to read.]

… Police entered an apartment occupied by migrant workers, a pregnant woman and her husband. They started beating the husband in front of the woman because the couple didn’t have the proper resident registration documents. She started haemorrhaging – both she and her unborn child died…

… In the suburbs of Moscow, three people went missing, two brothers and their sister… Their relatives, who had come from Tajikistan to search for them, turned to our organization for help. We called the bakery where they had been working. The first time, they told us, ‘We don’t know anyone by those names.’ The second time, the owner himself came to the phone: ‘Yes, I had some Tajiks working for me. I paid them for three months and that same day, they all took off. I couldn’t tell you where they went.’ That’s when we went to the police. All three of them had been found bludgeoned to death and buried in the woods. The bakery owner started making threatening phone calls to the fund: ‘I have people everywhere. I’ll bury you, too.’

… Two young Tajiks were taken to the hospital in an ambulance from a construction site… They spent all night waiting in a cold room and nobody helped them. The doctors didn’t conceal their feelings: ‘Why do you black-asses keep showing up here?’

… One night, a group of riot policemen rounded up fifteen Tajik street cleaners, marched them out of the basement where they had been living, threw them down on the snow and started beating them. Stamping on them with their steel-toed boots. One fifteen-year-old boy died…

… A mother received her son’s body from Russia. Without any of his internal organs… You can buy anything on the Moscow black market, everything a person has: kidneys, lungs, livers, pupils, heart valves, skin…

These are my brothers and sisters… I was born in the Pamir region myself. I’m a highlander. For us, good soil is worth its weight in gold; where we come from, they don’t measure wheat by the bag, they measure it by the tubeteika [6]. We’re surrounded by towering mountains. Compared to them, everything man-made seems childish. Like a toy. You live with your feet on the ground and your head in the clouds. You’re up so high, it’s like you’re already in the next world. The sea is completely different, it draws you in like a magnet, but the mountains make you feel protected, they stand guard over you. Like a second set of walls for your home. Tajiks aren’t warriors: when enemies invaded our land, our people would hide up in the mountains… [She is silent.] My favourite Tajik song is a dirge about leaving your native land. I cry every time I hear it… The most terrifying fate for a Tajik is leaving his Motherland. Living far away from her. A man without his homeland is like a nightingale without a garden. I’ve been living in Moscow for many years now, but I always surround myself with things that remind me of home: if I see a picture of the mountains in a magazine, I’ll cut it out and put it on my wall. The same goes for pictures of flowering apricots and fields of white cotton. In my dreams, I often pick cotton… I open up the boll, it has very sharp edges, and there’s a little white clump in it, like cotton, almost weightless. You have to take it out without scratching your hands. In the morning, I wake up tired… I always look for Tajik apples at the Moscow markets, they’re the sweetest ones in the world; Tajik grapes are sweeter than sugar cubes. When I was little, I dreamed that one day, I’d see the Russian forest, mushrooms… I thought about how I would go and meet those people. That’s the other half of my soul: the peasant hut, the Russian stove, pirozhki. [She is silent.] I’m telling you about our lives… about my brothers… To you, they all look the same: black hair, unwashed, hostile. From a world you don’t understand. A stranger’s grief that God has deposited on your doorstep. But they don’t feel like they’ve come to live with strangers, their parents lived in the USSR; Moscow used to be everyone’s capital. Now, they have jobs and shelter here. In the East, they say you shouldn’t spit in the well you drink from. When they’re in school, all Tajik boys dream of going to Russia to make money… They’ll borrow from everyone in their village to buy their tickets. At the border, Russian customs officers ask them, ‘Who are you going to visit?’ And they all answer ‘Nina.’… For them, all Russian women are Nina… They don’t teach Russian in school any more. All of them bring their prayer rugs…

[We’re sitting in the foundation’s offices, which are just a few small rooms. The telephones never stop ringing.]

Yesterday, I saved a girl’s life… She managed to call me from the car while a group of cops were driving her out to the forest. She called me and whispered, ‘They grabbed me off the street, and now they’re taking me out of the city. All of them are drunk.’ She told me the licence plate number… They had been too drunk to search her and confiscate her phone. The girl had just come from Dushanbe… a beautiful girl… I’m an Eastern woman, I was very little when my mother and grandmother began teaching me how to talk to men. ‘You can’t fight fire with fire, you can only use wisdom,’ my grandma would say. I called up the police station: ‘Hello, my dear man, I’ve just been notified of a strange situation unfolding. Your boys are taking our girl somewhere she shouldn’t be going and they’re drunk. Call them before things take a bad turn. We know their licence plate number.’ On the other end of the line, it’s a constant stream of obscenities: ‘These churki, those black monkeys who must have just climbed down from the trees, why the hell are you wasting your time on them?’ ‘Darling, listen, I’m a black monkey myself… I’m your mother…’ Silence! After all, the person on the other end is human, too… That’s what I pin all my hopes on… Little by little, our exchange turned into a conversation. Fifteen minutes later, they turned the car around… they brought back the girl… They could have raped her, killed her. In the forest… I’ve had to pick girls like her up piece by piece on more than one occasion… Do you know what I am? I’m an alchemist… We run a non-profit – no money, no power, just good people. Our helpers. We aid and rescue the defenceless. Our results materialize out of nothing: just nerve, intuition, Eastern flattery, Russian pity, and simple words like ‘my dear’, ‘my good man’, ‘I knew you were a real man and wouldn’t fail to help a woman in need.’ ‘Boys,’ I say to the sadists in uniform, ‘I have faith in you. I know that you’re human.’ I had this very long conversation with a police general… He wasn’t an idiot or some one-track-mind military type, he seemed cultivated. ‘Did you know,’ I said to him, ‘that you have a real Gestapo man on your force? He’s a master of torture, everyone is afraid of him. Every homeless person and migrant worker he comes across ends up crippled.’ I thought that he’d be horrified or at least get scared and start defending the honour of the uniform. But he just looked at me with a smile: ‘Tell me his last name. Good man! We’ll promote him, reward him. We need to take good care of such members of our staff. I’ll personally make sure that he gets an award.’ I went numb. He went on: ‘To tell you the truth… We intentionally create impossible conditions for you people so that you’ll leave as soon as possible. There are two million migrant workers in Moscow, the city can’t digest this many of you suddenly descending on us. There are just too many of your kind here.’ [Silence.]

Moscow is beautiful… You and I strolled through the city and you kept exclaiming, ‘Moscow has become so beautiful! It’s a real European capital now!’ I don’t feel this beauty. When I walk along looking at the new buildings, I always remember: two Tajiks died here, falling from the scaffolding… Here, a man drowned in cement… I remember how ridiculously little people were paid to dig these foundations. Everyone makes money off them: bureaucrats, policemen, building managers… A Tajik street cleaner signs a contract saying he’ll earn thirty thousand roubles, but they only ever pay him seven. The rest is taken from him, redistributed among various bosses… Bosses and bosses’ bosses… Laws don’t mean anything around here – it’s all about money and muscle. The little man is the most vulnerable creature on earth, even an animal in the forest is more protected than he is. For you, the forest protects the animals; for us, it’s the mountains… [She falls silent.] I spent most of my life under socialism. I remember how much we idealized man, I too used to hold human beings in high regard. In Dushanbe, I worked at the Academy of Sciences. I was an art historian. I thought that books… that what men had written about themselves was the truth… But actually, it’s only a tiny sliver of the truth. I haven’t been an idealist for a long time now, I know too much. This girl comes in to see me all the time, she’s unstable… She used to be a famous violinist. What made her lose her grip? Maybe it was people constantly saying to her, ‘You play the violin – what good is that? You know two languages – what for? Your job is to clean up, sweep the floors. You’re nothing but slaves here.’ This girl, she doesn’t play the violin any more. She’s forgotten everything.

There was also this young man… One day, the police caught him somewhere in the suburbs of Moscow, took his money, but it wasn’t enough for them. They got mad. Drove him out to the forest. Beat him. It was the middle of winter. Freezing cold. They stripped him down to his underwear… Ha, ha, ha… Tore up all of his documents. And yet, here he was, telling me the story. I asked him, ‘So how did you make it out of there alive?’ ‘I was sure I was going to die, I was running barefoot through the snow. Then suddenly, it was like a fairy tale, I saw a little hut in the middle of the woods. I knocked on the window, and an old man came out. He handed me a blanket so I could warm myself, poured me tea, and served me jam. Gave me clothes to wear. The next day, he led me to a large village and found a trucker who would take me back to Moscow.’

That old man… He is Russia, too…

She is called into the next room, ‘Gafkhar Kandilovna, someone is here to see you.’ I wait for her to return. I have time. I think about the things I heard in Moscow apartments.

IN MOSCOW APARTMENTS

— We’ve been overrun… That’s the Russian soul for you, we’re too kind…

— The Russian people are not at all kind. That’s just a widespread misconception. They’re maudlin, sentimental, but they’re not kind. Someone killed a stray dog and made a video of it. The whole internet blew up. People were ready to lynch the guy who did it. But when seventeen migrant workers were burnt alive at a market – their boss would lock them up in a metal wagon at night along with his goods – the only people who stood up for them were human rights advocates. People whose occupation it is to stand up for everyone. The general feeling was, ‘These people died, others will come to replace them.’ Faceless, voiceless… strangers…

— They’re slaves. Modern-day slaves. All they have are their dicks and their trainers. And back in their homeland, things are even worse than they are in the most rotten of Moscow basements.

— A bear accidentally wound up in Moscow and survived the whole winter here. All he ate was migrant workers. Because who counts them… Ha, ha, ha…

— Before the fall of the Soviet Union, we lived together like one big family… That’s what they taught us in political literacy classes… Back then, they were ‘guests in the capital’, now they’re ‘churkas’ and ‘khaches’. My grandfather would tell me about how he defended Stalingrad alongside Uzbeks. They all believed that they were brothers forever!

— What you’re saying surprises me… They’re the ones who decided to split off from us. They wanted freedom. Did you forget that? Remember how they’d murder Russians in the nineties? Rob them, rape them. Chase them out of their homes. A knock on the door in the middle of the night… They break in, some holding knives, others, machine guns: ‘Get the hell out of our country, you Russian swine!’ Five minutes to pack… and a free trip to the nearest railway station. People would run out of their apartments in their slippers… That’s how it was…

— We remember the humiliations suffered by our brothers and sisters! Death to the churkas! It’s hard to rouse the Russian Bear, but once he’s up, there’ll be rivers of blood.

— The Central Asians bashed the Russians’ faces in with their gun butts. Whose turn is it now?

— I hate skinheads! All they know how to do is beat innocent Tajik street cleaners to death with hammers or baseball bats. At rallies, they shout, ‘Russia for Russians, Moscow for Muscovites.’ Well, my mother is Ukrainian and my father’s Moldovan – only my maternal grandmother is Russian. So what does that make me? What criteria are they planning on using to ‘cleanse’ Russia of non-Russians?

— Three Tajiks can do the job of one dump truck. Ha, ha, ha…

— I miss Dushanbe. I grew up there. Studied Farsi. The language of poets.

— I dare you to walk through the city holding a poster that says, ‘I love Tajiks.’ You’d get beaten up instantly.

— There’s a construction site next door. Khachi scuttling about like rats. Because of them, I’m scared of walking home from the shop at night. They could kill you for a cheap mobile phone…

— Says you! I’ve been mugged twice – both times, it was Russians. The time I almost got killed in my building hallway – also Russians. I’m so fed up with those God-bearing people.

— So you would let your daughter marry a migrant?

— This is my hometown. My capital. And they’ve showed up here with their Sharia law. On Kurban Bayram [7], they slaughter their sheep right under my windows. Why not on Red Square then? The cries of the poor animals, their blood gushing everywhere… You go outside, and here, and there… you see red puddles all over the pavement. I’m out walking with my kid: ‘Mama, what is that?’ That day, the city goes dark. It stops being our city. They pour out of the basements by the hundreds of thousands… The policemen press themselves against the walls in terror…

— I’m dating a Tajik. His name is Said. He’s as beautiful as a god! At home, he was a doctor; here, he’s a construction worker. I’m head over heels for him. What do I do? We go walking in the parks or get out of the city altogether so that we won’t run into anyone who knows me. I’m afraid of my parents finding out. My father warned me, ‘If I see you with a darkie, I’ll shoot you both.’ What does my father do? He’s a musician… he graduated from the conservatory…

— If a ‘darkie’ is out walking with a girl… and she’s one of our girls… People like that ought to be castrated.

— What do people hate them for? Their brown eyes, the shape of their noses. For no reason at all. Everyone has to hate someone: their neighbours, the cops, oligarchs, the damn Yankees… It doesn’t matter! There’s so much hatred in the air… You can’t get through to people…

‘… The uprising I witnessed terrified me for the rest of my life!’ [It’s lunch-time. Gafkhar and I drink tea out of Tajik bowls and continue our conversation.]

Someday, the things I remember will drive me insane…

1992… Instead of the freedom we had all been waiting for, civil war broke out. People from Kulob started killing people from Pamir, and Pamirites started killing Kulobites… People from Karategin, Hisor, and Garm all splintered off. There were posters all over the city: ‘Hands off Tajikistan, Russians!’ ‘Go back to Moscow, Communists!’ This was no longer the Dushanbe I loved… Mobs roamed the streets, armed with metal fixtures and rocks… Completely peaceful, quiet people turned into murderers overnight. Just yesterday, they were absolutely different, calmly drinking tea at the chaikhana; today they were walking around ripping women’s stomachs open with metal rods… Shattering shop windows, smashing kiosks. I went to the market… Hats and dresses hung from the branches of the acacias, the dead lay on the ground – all in one heap, people and animals together… [She is silent.] I remember it was a beautiful morning. For a moment, I forgot about the war. It seemed like everything would go back to the way it was before. The apple trees were in bloom and the apricots… No signs of war anywhere. I opened the window wide. Immediately, I saw this roving, dark mob heading in my direction. They walked in silence. Suddenly, one of them turned toward me and we locked eyes… I could tell he was a poor man, the look in his eyes said, ‘I could come into your beautiful home right now and do whatever I want, this is my time…’ That’s what his eyes told me… I was completely horrified… I leapt away from the window, shut the blinds, one set, then another, locked the doors, bolted all the locks, and hid in the innermost room. There was fervour in his eyes… There’s something satanic about a mob. I’m scared of even remembering it… [She cries.]

I saw a Russian boy being murdered in the courtyard. No one went out to help him, everyone just closed their windows. I ran outside in my bathrobe: ‘Leave him alone! You’ve already killed him!’ He lay there without moving… They left. But soon, they came back to finish him off – they were just kids, all of them were the same age as him. Boys… just boys… I called the police. They stopped by, took a look at who was being beaten to death, and left. [She falls silent.] The other day, I heard some people in Moscow saying, ‘I love Dushanbe. What an amazing city it used to be! I miss it.’ I was so grateful to the Russian who said that! Nothing but love can save us. Allah will not hear prayers said with ill will. Allah teaches us that you shouldn’t open a door that you won’t be able to close… [Pause.] They killed a friend of ours… He was a poet. Tajiks love poetry, every single household has books of poetry, even just one or two of them. To us, poets are holy men. You mustn’t harm them. And yet they murdered him! Before killing him, they broke his hands… because he wrote… Soon afterwards, another one of our friends was killed… There wasn’t a single bruise on his body, everything was perfectly intact because they only hit him on the mouth… for what he said… It was spring. It was sunny and warm out, but people were killing one another… It made you want to go up into the mountains.

Everyone was leaving. Running for their lives. We had friends in America. In San Francisco. They told us to come. We rented a small apartment there. It was so beautiful! The Pacific Ocean… wherever you go, you can see it. I spent entire days sitting on the beach and weeping, I was incapable of doing anything else. I had come from the war, where you could be killed over a bag of milk… One day, I saw an old man walking along the shore, his trousers rolled up, wearing a brightly coloured T-shirt. He stopped in front of me: ‘What happened to you?’ ‘There’s a war in my Motherland. Brothers are killing brothers.’ ‘Then stay here.’ He told me that I would be healed by the ocean and all the beauty… He comforted me for a long time. I wept. Kind words always had the same effect on me: hearing them, I would be drowning in tears. Kind words make me cry harder than the gunshots had back home. Or the blood.

But I couldn’t stay in America. I was dying to get back to Dushanbe, and if it was too dangerous to go home, I wanted to be as close to home as possible. We moved to Moscow… I remember how once, we were over at our friend’s house, she’s a poet. I was listening to their endless grumbling: Gorbachev is all talk… Yeltsin’s an alcoholic… The people are just cattle… How many times had I heard these things already? A thousand times! The hostess wanted to take my plate away to rinse it off, but I wouldn’t let her – I can eat everything off the same plate. Fish and dessert. I’ve lived through war… Another writer had a refrigerator full of cheese and salami –Tajiks had long forgotten what these things were – and again, all evening long, that same grumbling: the government is evil, the democrats are no different from the Communists… Russian capitalism is cannibalism… And no one was doing anything about it. Everyone was waiting for a revolution which was expected to come at any moment. I don’t like these disappointed people in their kitchens. I’m not one of them. The uprising I witnessed terrified me for the rest of my life; I know what it looks like when freedom falls into inexperienced hands. Idle chatter always ends in blood. War is a wolf that can come to your door as well… [Silence.]

Did you see those videos online? They wrecked me. I spent a week in bed after watching them… Those videos… They murdered people and filmed it. They had a screenplay, they wrote out the dialogue… like they were making a real film… Now they just needed an audience. And we watched… they forced us to. There’s a guy walking down the street, one of us, a Tajik… They call him over, he comes, and they knock him down. They beat him with baseball bats. At first, he struggles around on the ground, then he grows quiet. They tie him up and throw him into the trunk of their car. In the forest, they tie him to a tree. You can see that the person filming is looking for the best angle so he can get a good shot. Then they cut off his head. Where did this come from? Decapitation is an Eastern ritual. Not Russian. It’s probably from Chechnya. I remember… One year, they were killing people with screwdrivers, then they started using garden forks, then it was pipes and hammers… All death resulting from blunt force trauma. Now there’s a new trend… [She is silent.] This time they actually found the people who did it. They’re going to court. All of them were boys from good families. Today they’re murdering Tajiks, tomorrow it will be the rich or those who pray to a different God. War is a wolf… It’s already here…

IN MOSCOW BASEMENTS

We chose a building – a Stalinka right in the centre of Moscow. These buildings are called Stalinkas because they went up during Stalin’s time, built to house the Bolshevik Party elite. And they’re still upscale today. Stalinist Imperial style: elaborate mouldings on the facades, bas- reliefs, columns, three- to four-metre ceilings. As the descendants of the country’s former leaders have gone down in the world, the ‘new Russians’ have been taking their places. The courtyard is full of Bentleys and Ferraris. On the street level, the lights are on in the windows of swanky boutiques.

Such is life above ground; underground, it’s a completely different world. A journalist friend and I descend into the basement. We spend a long time winding among rusted pipes and mould-infested walls. From time to time, our path is obstructed by painted metal doors studded with locks and seals, but that’s just for show. If you know the secret knock, you’re in. The basement teems with life. A long, well-lit corridor is lined with rooms on either side: their walls are made of plywood, they have multicoloured blinds for doors. Moscow’s underground world is divided between the Tajiks and the Uzbeks. We’ve found ourselves among Tajiks. Seventeen to twenty people live in each room. It’s a commune. Someone recognizes my guide – it’s not his first time down here – and invites us into his room. There’s a heap of shoes in the doorway next to a number of prams. In the corner, a stove, a gas tank, and tables and chairs dragged here from nearby dumpsters, all packed tightly into the small common space. The rest of the room is taken up by homemade bunk beds.

It’s dinner-time. About ten people are already sitting around the table. Meet Amir, Khurshid, Ali… The older ones, who attended Soviet schools, speak Russian without an accent, while the young ones don’t speak any Russian at all. They just smile.

They’re happy to have guests over.

— We’re about to have a bite to eat. [Amir sits us down at the table. He used to be a teacher. Here, he’s like an elder.] Try our Tajik pilaf. You won’t believe how good it is! The Tajik custom is that if you see a stranger near your house, you have to invite them over and give them a cup of tea.

I’m not allowed to record them, they’re scared. I get out my pen. They respect people who write and that helps me. Some of them come from villages, others came down from the mountains. Suddenly, they’ve all found themselves in this enormous megalopolis.

— Moscow is good, there’s a lot of work. But living here is scary. When I am walking down the street alone, even during the day, I never look young men in the eye – they could kill me. You have to pray every day…

— Three guys came up to me on the commuter rail… I was heading home from work. ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘I’m going home.’ ‘Where’s your home? Who asked you to come here?’ They started beating me up. Pummelling me, screaming, ‘Russia for Russians! Glory to Russia!’ ‘Why are you doing this? Allah sees everything.’ ‘Your Allah can’t see you here. We have our own God.’ They knocked my teeth out… broke one of my ribs… A train car full of people and only one girl stood up for me. ‘Leave him alone! He didn’t do anything to you.’ ‘What’s your problem? We’re beating a khach.’

— They killed Rashid… stabbed him thirty times. Tell me, why thirty times?

— It’s all the will of Allah… A dog will bite a doomed man even if he’s on a camel.

— My father studied in Moscow. Now he laments the loss of the USSR day and night. He dreamt that I would come here to study like he did. Instead, the police brutalize me, my boss beats me… I live in a basement like a cat.

— I don’t feel sorry for the Soviet Union… Our neighbour Kolya was Russian… He would scream at my mother when she’d speak Tajik to him. ‘Speak normally. It’s your country, but we’re the ones in charge here.’ My mother would cry.

— I had a dream last night, I was walking down our street and the neighbours were all bowing to me, ‘Salaam alaikum… Salaam alaikum…’ The only people left in our villages are women, old men, and children.

— At home, I made five dollars a month. I have a wife and three kids… In the villages, people go years without seeing sugar…

— I’ve never been to Red Square. I haven’t seen Lenin. It’s all work! Work! Shovel, pickaxe, wheelbarrow. All day long, I’m dripping in sweat like a watermelon.

— I paid this major for my documents: ‘May Allah grant you lasting health, good man!’ But the documents he gave me turned out to be false! I ended up in a jail cell. They kicked me, beat me with their truncheons.

— Without ID, you don’t exist…

— A man without his homeland is like a stray dog, anyone can have their way with him. The police can stop you ten times a day: ‘Your papers.’ You have this one document, but you don’t have that other one. If you don’t pay them off, they beat you.

— Who are we? Construction workers, freight loaders, street cleaners, dishwashers… You won’t find us among the managers here…

— My mother’s happy, I send her money. She found me a beautiful girl, although I haven’t seen her yet. Mama arranged it all for me. I’ll go back and marry her.

— All summer long, I worked in the suburbs of Moscow for this one rich guy, and in the end, he wouldn’t pay me. ‘Scram! Scram! I fed you.’

— If you’re the one with one hundred sheep, you’re right. You’re always right.

— My friend wanted to know when his boss was going to pay him. It took the police a long time to find his body afterwards. They’d buried it in the forest… His mother received a coffin from Russia.

— If they kick us out, who’s going to build Moscow? Who’ll sweep the courtyards? Russians would never work for this kind of money.

— When I close my eyes, I see the water running through the irrigation ditch, the cotton all in bloom, its flowers a gentle pink, it’s like a garden.

— Did you know that we had a major war? After the fall of the USSR, they started shooting everyone… Only the people with machine guns lived well. I’d walk to school… Every day, on my way there, I’d pass two or three corpses. My mother stopped letting me go, so I stayed home and read Omar Khayyam. Everyone reads Khayyam. Do you know his poetry? If you do, you’re a sister to me.

— They were killing infidels…

— It’s for Allah to decide who is faithful and who is an infidel. He will be the one to judge.

— I was little… I never shot anyone. My mother told me that before the war, they lived like this: at weddings, there’d always be people speaking Tajik, Uzbek, and Russian. People who wanted to pray would pray, and those who didn’t want to didn’t. Tell me, sister, why were people so quick to start killing each other? They’d all read Khayyam in school. And Pushkin.

— The people are a caravan of camels that must be herded with a whip…

— I’m studying Russian… Listen: ‘pretty gurl, bred, maney… the boss is meen…’

— I’ve lived in Moscow for five years, and not once has anyone said hello to me on the street. Russians need ‘blacks’ so they can feel ‘white’. So they have someone to look down on.

— As every night has a morning, every sorrow has an end.

— Our girls are more radiant than the ones here. That’s why it’s said that they’re like pomegranates…

— It’s all the will of Allah…

We ascend from the underground. I look at Moscow with new eyes – its beauty now seems cold and uneasy. Moscow, do you care whether people like you or not?

1 This is a widely used pejorative term for one who adheres to Soviet values, attitudes and behaviours. ‘Sovok’ can also refer to the Soviet Union itself. It’s a pun on the word for ‘dustpan’. — Trans.

2 ‘Ten years without the right of correspondence’ is a clause that appeared in official form letters addressed to relatives of political prisoners regarding the status of the arrested, especially during Stalin’s purges of the 1930s. It often meant that the person had been executed.

3 The Stalin-initiated campaign of ‘liquidating of the kulak class’ lasted from 1929 to 1932, entailing the arrest, deportation, and execution of better-off peasants (‘kulaks’) and their families, for the purposes of seizing their property and incorporating it into collective enterprises (‘collectivization’).

4 The Virgin Lands Campaign was an agricultural reform strategy initiated by Nikita Khrushchev in 1953, the purpose of which was to increase crop yields rapidly by bringing a vast swathe of new land under cultivation. The workers who participated in the campaign faced severe food, housing, and machinery shortages.

5 The youth organization associated with Putin’s political party, United Russia; the name means ‘Our People’.

6 Central Asian men’s cap. Gafkhar is emphasizing the scarcity of grain.

7 Another name for the Eid festival, a Muslim holiday celebrating Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son as an act of submission to God.

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Spice: Americans turn to dangerous 'synthetic marijuana' to evade drug tests

Makers of ‘fake weed’ continually alter its chemical makeup to skirt laws, but users face serious dangers, from kidney failure to stroke

Jessica Glenza in Jackson, Mississippi and New York The Guardian (UK)

A man comes into the emergency room in Jackson, Mississippi. Six-foot-four, 240lbs. “Solid, brick muscle”, recalls Dr Robert Galli, a professor of emergency medicine and toxicology at the University of Mississippi medical center (UMMC) in Jackson.

“This big guy was fumbling around in the street, he was rolling around in the grass, he had no shirt on, his pants and underwear were down to his shoes, and he’s flopping around in the rain with about 15 people taking videos of him.”

Someone called 911. First the fire department arrived, followed by police, then paramedics, who ascertained from the surrounding crowd that the man smoked “Spice”.

Spice is known as fake weed or synthetic marijuana because it grabs hold of the same receptors in the brain. But the lab-made powder bears little resemblance to the plant Americans increasingly see as benign.

And because synthetic marijuana is ever evolving, standard urine drug screenings don’t detect it. Most confirmed poisonings are ferreted out by epidemiologists, after the bizarre symptoms land users in the hospital.

“Sure enough, this guy was using Spice regularly if he wanted to get high, and now he got a hold of the bad stuff,” Galli said.

In several states across the US, the class of drugs known as Spice is causing a rash of poisonings that doctors say are fuelled by residents’ desire to get high without failing drug tests, as the continually changing class of drugs has eluded authorities.

“Rogue chemists” avoid illegality, and help their customers avoid drug screenings, by delivering constantly changing, untested formulations to the American public. And the tactic appears to have proved successful, daring drug war era legislation to keep up.

“The experimentation on this is with the American public,” said Galli. “It’s not like these are given to animals to see how they respond. These are given to human animals, and they get it on the street.”

Mississippians make up an outsized chunk of those reported poisoned by synthetic marijuana each year. The state was almost solely responsible for a massive spike in poisonings the weekend of Easter 2015.

In 2015, Mississippians reported 1,362 poisonings from synthetic cannabinoids, with17 deaths suspected to be related to the drugs. The tiny state is just 367 poisonings shy of the number of poisonings reported New York state, where 16m more people live, and where the cheap drug has reportedly ravaged homeless communities in New York City and working class towns such as Syracuse.

Synthetic marijuana poisoning symptoms usually include violent outbursts and paranoia; more serious symptoms, such as kidney failure, stroke, and fast and irregular heartbeat, have all been documented in medical literature.

By contrast, many researchers consider marijuana less addictive and toxic caffeine, despite its mind-altering properties. Death by marijuana is almost unheard of. Recently, however, some researchers have concluded that regular marijuana use can be harmful for teens’ brain development, affecting problem solving and memory, and there is some evidence that marijuana may amplify the risk of psychosis or serious mental health issues for those already at risk.

A group of high-profile doctors recently came out in favor of legalization in part because the group believes marijuana prohibition causes “the proliferation of dangerous synthetic cannabinoids”. Doctors for Cannabis Legalization, which counts a former surgeon general among its membership, list this in its “declaration of principles” against prohibition.

A 2014 Medscape poll of physicians found that doctors broadly supported regulation of marijuana. Seventy-nine per cent of physicians supported some form of legalization, either for medical purposes or full legal regulation.

Together, Mississippi and New York make up almost 40% of the synthetic marijuana poisonings reported in 2015, of the nearly 8,000 nationwide. If the sparse data on poisonings and emergency department visits is to be believed, 2015 was one of the drug’s most damaging years since its introduction to the United States almost a decade ago.

Spice is commonly sold at gas stations or corner stores in colorful foil packaging, advertising flavors such as strawberry. Chemicals included in the packets can range from relatively benign compounds developed by university chemists, such as JWH-018, to those doctors believe are dangerous, such as AB-Chminaca.

Synthetics first hit the market around 2006, popping up in smoke shops, unregulated and labeled “not for human consumption”. Despite the substances being manufactured in illicit (and sometimes filthy) Chinese laboratories, doctors now believe that the synthetics that hit the market 10 years ago were chemicals hijacked from pharmacologists’ published research.

Some scientists now believe that drug dealers read their research, sent the formulas to China for manufacturing, then shipped them into the US for sale. Once the materials were in the states, traffickers dissolved the powdered chemicals with acetone-like thinners, mixed that liquid with snow cone flavorings, and sprayed it onto tea leaves packaged in colorful foils.

One such example is a molecule developed by John W Huffman, JWH-018, who, as an organic chemistry professor from Clemson University, developed the molecule hoping it could provide nausea relief and appetite stimulation to patients without the euphoria of marijuana.

Around 2007, Huffman began receiving calls from “law enforcement agencies, the military, and panicked parents” who discovered JWH-018 in Spice users who had reacted badly.

In 2011, as the popularity of the drugs peaked among teenagers, the Drug Enforcement Agency took a swing at the problem with its biggest hammer: a Schedule I drug classification that outlawed molecules such as JWH-018, and allowed new ones to be emergency-classified as illegal.

Whether that reduced demand is unclear. The emergency scheduling did, however, appear to trigger a chemical arms race as “rogue” chemists produced ever more mangled cannabinoids to avoid illegality.

The most disturbing recent additions to the chemical spectrum that makes up Spice, according to toxicologists and clinicians at UMMC, are AB-Chminaca and MAB-Chminaca. Unlike marijuana, which only binds partially to cannabis receptors in the brain, these new synthetic cannabinoids grab ferociously on to neural receptors. Both are mutations of the JHW-018 molecule.

 Preet Bharara, the US attorney for the southern district of New York, speaks at a news conference where it was announced that authorities had broken up a group that trafficked in ‘synthetic marijuana’.

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 Preet Bharara, the US attorney for the southern district of New York, speaks at a news conference where it was announced that authorities had broken up a group that trafficked in ‘synthetic marijuana’. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

AB-Chminaca and MAB-Chminaca were identified in a spate of poisonings that sent four people to UMMC’s emergency room in four hours on Good Friday, 3 April, 2015, and then sent 200 more patients into UMMC’s emergency room that spring. The chemicals were only identified in Mississippi after doctors at the medical center analyzed drug samples using a liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometer, an hourlong process performed by a machine generally available only at research institutions.

According to two agents of the Mississippi bureau of narcotics as well as Galli, the first death was of a man who took one puff of a “Spice” joint in a Jackson city club in March, collapsed, and never regained consciousness before dying the same night.

By November, the supply of AB- and MAB-Chminaca still hadn’t dried up in Mississippi. Another seven patients were reportedly hospitalized at UMMC over Thanksgiving weekend, this time vomiting. For emergency department staff, this only complicated matters: Spice patients are generally sedated until the drug wears off, but these patients ran the risk of choking on their own vomit.

Until recently, Spice was associated with the poor and the young. In 2011, it was the second-most used drug behind marijuana among students in the 8th, 10th and 12th grades, according to the national Monitoring the Future survey. More than one in 10 had tried Spice.

Mississippi bureau of narcotics agents said the backgrounds of users, ranging from ages 12 to 64 and from nearly every class of society, were so diverse as to make detecting a pattern impossible. Some of the only survey information on who uses synthetic marijuana shows that nearly a quarter (24%) of regular marijuana smokers currently use the drug, but little more is clear.

But as Monitoring the Future shows use declining among teenagers, anecdotal reports suggest that authorities’ inability to detect Spice has made it appealing to those most frequently drug tested.

A handful of adverse reactions were reported among football players, athletes who are still sanctioned for smoking marijuana. Robert Nkemdiche, a high-profile player at the University of Mississippi expected to be an NFL draft pick in 2016, fell out of a hotel window after allegedly smoking synthetic marijuana, Fox Sports reported. His brother Denzel, also an Ole Miss player, was allegedly hospitalized after standing on the roof of a building, paranoid and wrapped in a blanket.

The New England Patriots defensive end Chandler Jones smoked synthetic marijuana before he showed up at a Massachusetts police station, half-naked and disoriented, in January.

Truck drivers, soldiers, oil rig workers, hospital staff, and even Walmart employees are regularly drug tested in the US. With other professions, an estimated 58% of the total US workforce is drug tested, according to one 2014 survey.

That doesn’t include probationers, parolees, or recipients of social services who are drug tested. Even Mississippi’s roughly 5,500 welfare recipients are screened for drug use (seven tested positive between April 2014 and 2015, according to Rethink Mississippi).

Marijuana legalization advocates reported that anti-drug policing is so aggressive, they had trouble collecting signatures for a ballot initiative, because voters feared police would access the petition and target signers, according to the Jackson Free Press.

As Spice poisoning victims flow into emergency departments, UMMC toxicologists say they continuously find new chemicals. DEA officials said they had identified hundreds of compounds included in packets sold as “Spice”.

Even in rabidly anti-drug Mississippi (it was the last state to repeal prohibition, in 1966), an emergency scheduling act similar to federal law can still only be updated when the part-time legislature is in session from January to May. Only federal agents can enforce the DEA’s more up-to-date ban.

In New York City, a local ordinance criminalized sale of the drugs after a massive interdiction of the drugs and packets by federal agents in New York City.

“You never know what you’re going to find. This instance, we were fortunate, we hit the motherlode,” said James Hunt, a New York DEA special agent, who helped search more than 80 bodegas and five Spice processing facilities around New York City in September 2015. Agents found enough of the chemical to fill 260,000 packets.

“I mean, for years we’ve been locking up heroin traffickers, cocaine traffickers, methamphetamine traffickers, those drugs have been around for umpteen years,” said Hunt. “This is something new. It’s a huge task. I’m not going to say it’s not.”