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Portrait 5

Assen: “There is Nothing I Am Looking Forward to”

17 07 2007  While heroin is losing its appeal among more prosperous Bulgarians, dealers have a firm foothold among the impoverished Roma.

By Nikoleta Popkostadinova in Sofia

Assen Kirilov, a young man with clouded brown eyes, sits on a park bench, his bare feet playing lazily with the worn-out slippers on the cement underneath. Though only 23, his movements are slow and uncoordinated. It seems as if something crosses his mind now and that he is about to say something but then he gives up, uninterested.

Kirilov is a Roma heroin addict from Faculteta, a district of about 35,000 inhabitants in Sofia that is home to the country’s second biggest Roma community.

The lit cigarette dangling in Kirilov’s fingers seems the most precious thing in the world to him. Second comes the beer can, standing beside him on the bench. He reaches for it with apparent desire but after raising it to his lips, he forgets the pleasure and drinks mechanically. With a blank stare he keeps the bottle at his mouth, before remembering to put it down to take another drag.

Kirilov meets me in one of Sofia’s central parks. He got his last injection seven hours earlier and is waiting to meet some friends. They are taking doses of methadone as part of a drive to give up drugs, apparently. But Kirilov doesn’t follow a treatment programme.

“I don’t want to stop,” he mutters, almost inaudibly, because most of his teeth are gone and he can’t speak clearly any longer. “There is no way out. What will I do if I stop taking drugs? I can’t see what I can possibly do. The same as before I started taking heroin - nothing.”

Kirilov has been an addict for eight years. He started injecting himself when he was 15, initially taking drugs from friends. When they asked him to buy his own drugs he got to know his first dealer. At the start, one dose made him feel fine for several days. But soon he needed bigger quantities. “Heroin gives me nothing now,” he admits. “But now no one and nothing can give me anything anyway.”

While Roma make up 5 to 10 per cent of the overall population in Bulgaria, they make up 30 per cent of the country’s heroin addicts according to a 2007 report by the Initiative for Health Foundation.

Evgeni Genchev, a coordinator in the same foundation, heading a campaign to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS amongst heroin addicts, says one reason for the number is the low price of heroin, its ready availability in Roma areas and the general misery of Roma life.

Roma remain by far the poorest ethnic group in Bulgaria. Many live in virtual ghettos without running water, a sewage system or other infrastructure. The rate of unemployment in the community is far higher than the average. While fewer than 9 per cent of Bulgarians are unemployed, almost 60 per cent of Bulgaria’s Roma have no job.

Kirilov went to school for three years and can read and write “perhaps a little”. But he hasn’t practiced these skills lately. Neither he nor his parents work, either, though he and his father sometimes undertake “jobs” to earn some money. This is how he gets the money for his fixes.

These undertakings are not legitimate trades. “Most often these ‘jobs’ are petty robberies, such as breaking into people’s cellars and stealing metal things to sell them as a scrap,” says Rumen Donski, chair of the Nadezhda - Sofia foundation, which lobbies on behalf of heroin addicts.

Sitting in a drop-in centre in Faculteta, where addicts can exchange used needles and syringes for new ones – and thus hopefully avoid becoming HIV-Positive - he says entire families from the Roma community are often addicted “from the grandparents to the grandchildren”.

“The living standard of the rest of the Bulgarians is going up and so many of them can afford ecstasy, amphetamines or other synthetic drugs that are less addictive,” Donski adds. “This is not the case with the Roma minority. Heroin is still their drug.”

Heroin use in Bulgaria peaked in the late 1990s, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Democracy, issued in 2003. Donski agrees that while Bulgarians are gradually weaning themselves off this drug, the Roma are not. “Within the Roma population the level of heroin use has kept steady,” he says.

“It's cheap and quite easy to obtain when you live so close to so many dealers,” he explains.

“A small dose of heroin can be bought for as little as 3 leva [1.5 euros],” Evgeni Genchev says. “Although it’s always diluted, mixed in with anything from powdered baby milk to strong sedatives such as Diazepam”.
“Smoking this type of mixture is more or less safe but if you inject yourself with it, you can just die,” Donski adds.

Donski notes that not long ago, heroin was sold openly in Faculteta at booths selling sweets and nuts. When the police got wind of this trade it became less open but it still carries on, undisturbed.

One of the big problems facing those trying to help addicts like Kirilov to liberate themselves from their fatal addiction is that addicts often feel embarrassed to use the centres.

Many prefer to keep to themselves, falling into less and less hygienic habits and endangering themselves and many others with dirty, shared needles. Kirilov is one of them. He gets his syringes from “around, sometimes from friends” and he never goes to the drop-in centre.

“Heroin remains the drug of the poor people”, concludes, Donski, “of people with no perspective. After they become addicted they have no arguments or stimulus to give up. Going back to the reality to them means going back to poverty, misery and isolation.”

Kirilov seems completely detached from the world around him. He says he lives with his parents, two brothers and grandfather but is unable to say whether his brothers go to school or take drugs. The only thing he knows about them is that they have never left Faculteta.

At the end of our meeting, he gives up waiting for his friends any longer, if indeed he was waiting for anyone at all. Without warning, he slowly rises and walks away with uncertain steps, towards the nothingness that he has chosen, or that he was perhaps doomed to embrace.


Nikoleta Popkostadinova is a journalist at Kapital weekly in Bulgaria and a fellow of BIRN’s Fellowship for Excellence in Journalism. Balkan Insight is BIRN`s online publication.

This article was created with the support of the US State Department and is part of the special package “Minorities in Bulgaria.”