Early Russian News Articles On Drug Addiction

Inspired with Early News Articles on HIV/AIDS, this dataset represents publications mentioning illegal drugs and drug-users in media published in Russian.

• Articles could have been published in Soviet, Russian and other post-soviet media outlets.
• Some of them are not dedicated to drug addiction but just mention it.
• Articles retrieved via digital archive of media in Russian
• This is not an exclusive list. Only those source that were available were included.

Fields description

media_name - name of newspaper, online resource, medical journal
date - publishing date, can be date, only month+year, only year
year - year of publication
txt - complete text of the publication. Can be a short news piece or a feature article.
file - reference file in the ZIP archive

Years

1980-1990 - 225 texts
1991 - 121 texts
1992 - 382 texts
1993 - 832 texts
1994 - 2990 texts
1995 - data to be added
1996 - 2621 texts (not full year)

Why this dataset

During the 1990s, drug usage became a significant problem in Russia. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting economic turmoil created conditions that led to an increase in drug trafficking and drug abuse. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that drug addiction was often seen as a moral failing rather than a medical condition, and drug users were stigmatized and ostracized by society. This led to a lack of public support for efforts to combat drug use, and many addicts were left to suffer in silence.

I think this dataset might be interesting for research of Russian stigmatising lexics and for sentiment analysis, or in other pet projects, media projects and human rights advocacy or historical research.

Picture by GRAS GRÜN on Unsplash