Photograph by Flickr user Vramak (CC-usage).

Editor’s note: This is the latest in Annasoltan’s ongoing coverage of the Turkmen healthcare system.  Check out her series “Influenzastan“.

Turkmenistan has built some of the largest sports and recreation facilities in Central Asia and is flexing their muscle to build more.  An Olympic village, stadiums, hippodromes, tennis courts, sport halls, gyms, and water sports complexes, to name a few, have risen up rather quickly.

Physical education, abolished during Niyazov’s rule as “unnecessary,” has been restored to schools, and recently the government-controlled media national sporting news has been given increased attention publishing the names of “best athletes of the year.” Promoting the motto “a healthy head in a healthy body,” sports is in the government’s areas of priority for development. So far so good.

But for some, sports have become a fanatical preoccupation while for others it simply misses the point.  For example, the “Ice Palace” was devoted to skating in a country covered by sand with temperature exceeding 40 degrees Centigrade. If the late Niyazov thought of sports facilities more as a decoration, Berdimuhamedov wants to see them filled with life.

There is also hope that new sports facilities will help boost tourism. The official goal is to get government officials and school children take part in troublesome hiking on the president’s “Health Path,” which becomes an extreme sport for workers, artists, students, sportsmen, pensioners and others on special days.  But people have questioned the money spent on them when the stadiums and hippodromes built by both presidents stand mostly empty.

Now Berdimuhamedov seems to have found a reason why the sports facilities should be used. The Turkmen president, a former health minister, thinks that there is more to sports and that sports can help solve drug addiction, especially among the young population.

Keep in mind that despite widespread heroin use, drug addiction has been largely a taboo subject and its existence has been denied by the authorities as officially there are no problems in this most reclusive of states. Instead of helping them, the authorities have used force and imprisonment against drug addicts.  So, Berdimuhamedov may be taking a bold step by even implicitly acknowledging the problem.

The following statement is from the official government website;  it is based on a brief report by the Turkmen State News Agency (TDH) informing about Turkmenistan’s efforts in cooperation with the UN on the National Programme on Combating Illicit Drug Trafficking and Recovering Drug Addicts, invited drug addicts to treat themselves to the following options:

The state support for the programme of wide propagation of a healthy lifestyle profoundly contributes to mitigating the adverse effects of drug addiction. Construction of stadiums, sports and health-improving centres, schools with gyms and swimming pools has been launched throughout the country.

Does it come close to what the mercurial Niyazov had claimed, namely, that when the people read his book Rukhnama the problem of heroin addiction was solved for all in Turkmenistan?

The idea sounds original, like trying to hit two birds with one stone.  But would the likelihood of people falling victim to drugs drop with the rise of sports facilities?  A former Turkmen medical worker who requested anonymity remarked to me:

It’s one thing to say something, but another to do something.  I don’t believe that if there are sports facilities young people will become less interested in drugs.  Drug addiction is a consequence of neglected socio-economic problems. Instead of pouring money into dead projects such as buildings and monuments the president should open more schools, and create workplaces to fight unemployment among young men.

Cahid Tekyardimci, a psychiatrist from Turkey, says that is a positive step to direct the youth towards sports although sports alone cannot fight drug addiction.  He says that sports could help against relapsing after medical and psychiatric treatment has been successful and the addicted person is cured.

It is first and foremost necessary to inform the people about the damage to body and psyche from drugs and to treat the addicted people properly. Regular sports can help keep people away from harmful habits such as smoking, drinking and drugs.