Taisiya Osipova was sentenced to 8 eight years in jail for selling and possessing heroin.
This was twice more even than what the prosecution requested. Even if the case was rock solid it would still be wildly disproportionate as she suffers from diabetes. But it’s not; to the contrary, there are reasonable suspicions that the drugs were planted by the police.
However Mrs. Osipova isn’t telegenic, and her politics are National Bolshevik, so she will get 1,000x less attention than the Pussy Rot whores.
Addendum 8/30: Certainly, unlike with Pussy Riot, I don’t see any Raskolnikov wannabe knifing a mother and daughter to death in their apartment and inscribing “Free Taisiya Osipova” in blood on the walls.
Dear Anatoly,
I completely agree. This is a genuine miscarriage. The sentence is appalling. I understand that Osipova has mental health problems, which if true makes the sentence even more grotesque. I don’t know the facts of the case and I don’t know whether Osipova was guilty or not but even if she was all that proves is that Russia’s drugs policy is completely wrong.
The whole global drug war policy that the international community as a whole pursues is completely misguided. This case is tragic, but just a microscopic example of the global tragedy as a whole.
Look at Mexico and their drug war, currently the bloodiest war in the world. That’s all you need to do to see where the drug policies have led to.
Agreed. Milton Friedman once made the point that only three groups benefit from drug prohibition: the mafia, who have a monopoly they wouldn’t otherwise have, the people the mafia bribe and the drug enforcement agencies who are kept in a job. For everyone else the war on drugs is a catastrophe.
Was Osipova jailed more for her political activities than for possessing and selling heroin? She and her husband Sergei Fomchenkov are active members of the National Bolshevik Party which was subsumed by the Other Russia movement led by Eduard Limonov. A couple of articles I Googled stress her political activity over her drug-related activities:
http://www.rferl.org/content/russia-activist-eight-years-in-jail/24690298.html
http://rbth.ru/articles/2012/08/28/opposition_activist_osipova_gets_eight_years_in_prison_17725.html
There has to be a reason for the police planting the drugs on her or in her house and her political activities would be part of that. Maybe that’s one reason the Western media hasn’t picked up the story – police planting drugs on people suspected of being political dissidents to frame them for illegal possession and selling is a common occurrence in most countries.
It does not matter whether that practice is common in many countries, what matters is that it happened in Russia. It is a story about a woman having drugs planted on her, possible political motivation, the story is beautiful, but Osipova isn’t.
One thing that strikes me about these cases in Russia, especially in respect to Moscow, is that once an organisation is designated as dangerous, such as the National Bolshevik’s, it seems to take a massive push by the central authorites to get the local police/security services to change course, & leads to the kinds of abuses like this.
The National Bolshevik’s ceased being any kind of threat almost as soon as they made there first splash, & from what I can tell are pretty much an amusing sideshow these days with the occasional interesting point – certainly nothing that should the focus of this kind of attention/abuse by local security.
This seems to apply to all kinds of organistions that have anything to do with politics, going in both directions, ie. Voina/PR should of been arrested long ago just for their repeated breaking of the law, & a number of their stunts would of seen them facing heavy jail time in pretty much any country in the world. Instead local authorities seemed to refuse to arrest them because they just wouldn’t touch anything remotely political without a clear signal from the top.
Much the same with the extreme nationalist organisations a few years back, & it took them going completely out of control in a public fashion before the authorities started cracking down on them.
Once they did they seemed to manage it in a pretty respectable manner, but there was also a lot of attention focused from the top on how it was done, & it seemed to improve the whole the whole level of discourse surrounding the scene.
Some of the issues surrounding how the security services handle these things seem to stem from Luzhkov’s idea of police reform, ie. any problems or criticism’s, just hire even more police without any attention to quality, & try to paper over the cracks;
Others from still unresolved hangovers from soviet times & the corrupt 90’s in some of the the security services, in which the local police seem to be the worst offenders;
But it seems like a major injection of quality middle management that will just do their job enforcing the law & ignore all the b*ll would correct a lot of this stuff (along with some pretty large-scale retention/retraining).
I’ve know that there is some major attempts at reform that is still ongoing, but there is obviously is a long way to go.
Would be interested in someone with more knowledge than me on how things are going with it, & some of the problems involved…