editorial comment Boo hoo!

Russian veterinarians are landing in jail and animals are being operated on without pain relief because an anti-drug law makes the necessary anesthesia either illegal or very difficult to obtain, animal-rights organizations say.

The veterinarians have appealed to their counterparts in other countries for help in their efforts to push for a relaxing of government restrictions governing the use of ketamine, a widely used anesthetic for small mammals.

Moscow veterinarian Alexander Duka says he has been forced to purchase the drug on the black market at inflated prices.

"I risked it because every job has to be done professionally and with quality. If you don't anesthetize the animal correctly, both the surgeon and the animal suffer," Duka says.

Animal-rights demonstrations have been staged in Moscow and at the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C.

Part of the problem, observers say, is that ketamine also is one of a trio of substances sometimes used as "date rape" drugs. In the USA, distribution to veterinarians is carefully controlled.

But in Russia, officials did not include ketamine on a list of allowed substances when they instituted an anti-drug law in 1998. Humane society officials think it may have just been an oversight at first.

Numerous sting operations have been documented in which officials from the Russian Department of Drug Control have called veterinarians to treat a sick animal and then arrested them if they arrive carrying ketamine.

The arrests began last November and December, says Irina Novozalova, president of the Russian animal-rights group Vita.

"Last June, the government established a special task force, the Drug Circulation Control Committee, to control the spread of narcotics. They decided, for some reason, to specifically target vets," she says.

Several veterinarians face up to 15 years in jail for administering black-market anesthetics to their animal patients.

The controversy over the drug law eventually led to a lifting of the outright ban on ketamine. But clinics must get special licenses and have a safe to hold the drug, an expense that critics say is prohibitive.

Larry Dee, president of the World Small Animal Veterinary Association, who met with Russian colleagues at a veterinary conference in Greece last month, said he was told that clinics are required to have safes with double steel walls.

"Those kind of safes cost about $15,000," he says.

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