Quote for the Week

Week-ending 8 January 2021

“By no means can policing functions and health-care functions be intermixed. As soon as they get mixed up, a sort of gray zone appears in which a person — especially if he is not able to protect himself — can become a victim of violence. In essence, the entire history of Soviet and Russian drunk tanks is only about this — about beatings, about murder, about rape. I have worked in this field a long time and those are the facts.”

– Oleg Zykov, director of the Institute of National Narcological Health

Source:

RFE/RL, 6 January 2021: At the beginning of 2010, there were 545 police-run drunk tanks, or sobering-up stations, across Russia. In 2009, the facilities were used more than 2.5 million times. Yet by the autumn of 2011, all of them had been liquidated as part of a broad police reform process undertaken by then-President Dmitry Medvedev. A new law that came into force at the end of December, however, will bring back a version of the drunk tank. But it remains to be seen exactly how the measure will be implemented. “By no means can policing functions and health-care functions be intermixed,” said Oleg Zykov, director of the Institute of National Narcological Health. “As soon as they get mixed up, a sort of gray zone appears in which a person — especially if he is not able to protect himself — can become a victim of violence,” Zykov said. “In essence, the entire history of Soviet and Russian drunk tanks is only about this — about beatings, about murder, about rape. I have worked in this field a long time and those are the facts.”

See also: ‘Зыков, Олег Владимирович,’ Wikipedia