OUTSIDE Moscow's Chemist Shop No. 1 a sordid trade had sprung up. Elderly people who cannot make ends meet on their pensions are selling their prescribed medicines to teenage drug addicts who mix them into cocktails which can kill.
The market operates in the very shadow of the Lubyanka, the headquarters of Russia's Secret Police, but it barely arouses the interest of the ordinary police, let alone the security service. The drug pushing, grandmothers and their youthful clients are just part of the anarchy of today's Russia.
I first read about the problem in the Moscow Times. It beggared belief that doctors at a special drug addiction centre were quoted as saying there was virtually nothing they could do to treat children as young as 12 who had become dependent on substances sold to them by old age pensioners.
Among the medicines favoured by the youths were nose drops, which could be mixed with other ingredients to create a powerful brew called Moulka, and ketamin, which is a painkiller.
Last week I went down to Lubyanka Square to observe the street scene. At 5 p.m., as the light faded, crowds pressed round the kiosks selling jeans, shoes, perfumes and computer disks, all imported from the West. The black limousines of the Mafia bosses who "protect" the kiosks, cruised up and down.
Among the crowd were two teenagers, one with a black wool cap pulled down over his ears, the other with a birth mark on his face, and they were not interested in the jeans.
A woman in her early 60s walked towards them from the chemist and I heard them ask: "Have you got any ketamin?" She disappointed them, then turned to me and asked if I had any iodine. I said no, but suggested we take a walk together.
Informed that I was a journalist, she identified herself as Lydia and said she had been an engineer in the northern mining town of Vorkuta. Now she lived on a pension worth the equivalent of £20 a month. She did not mind telling me how hard her life was.
"I have three children; but they have their own lives to lead," she said. "I must manage on my own. And you know what the Communists used to say - He who does not work does not eat."
But she was shy of telling me exactly how she worked. The boys had been wanting ketamin, had they not, I asked. "Oh no, love, not ketamin. Vitamins," she said with a smile. And she knew that I knew she was, as the Russians, charmingly put it, hanging noodles on my ears.
Why did she want iodine from me? "For technical reasons," was all she would say. I am not sure of the significance of iodine. Perhaps it is an ingredient put into the cocktails, with which the young drug addicts inject themselves, or perhaps it is a code word for some other substance.
Leaving Lydia, I went into the chemists, a pre revolution building with chandeliers hanging from the pink plastered ceilings. The two youths were inside now, laughing at the sanitary towels in a glass case and bothering the customers, sneezing and coughing in the queue for cold cures.
Tamara Maximovna, the manager of the shop, was eating a pate sandwich in a backroom. She was friendly enough until I asked her about the drug trade going on right outside her establishment. "What happens on the street has nothing to do with us," she said coldly. "Go and talk to the police."
THE police, overwhelmed as they are with violent organised crime, enforce as best they can the laws against trafficking in drugs such as heroin and cocaine.
However, Soviet law makers failed to foresee a time when pensioners might be reduced to trading in medicines and there are no laws against it. The police move the grandmothers and their clients on, but they are soon back again.
The medicines are cheap. A shot of ketamin costs a mere 8000 roubles (£1.25).
It is difficult to talk to the addicts. But Viktor P, a young man who narrowly escaped addiction to Moulka, described his experiences under the drug. He said he was offered it by one of the doctors whose job is to treat addicts as well as grandmothers - corrupt doctors are sometimes a source of narcotics.
Viktor was out in the Russian countryside when he injected the cocktail, popular with the youngsters because it enhances sexual performance. "I felt an enormous surge of energy ... I felt I could do anything. I was a god."
"I remember clouds were covering the moon. I wanted to see it. I lifted my arm and punched a hole in the clouds so the moon shone through. It was a wonderful feeling. But after, when I realised my human weakness, I was more miserable than I have ever been in my life."
"My first thought was that I must immediately take the drug again. But then I realised this was a trap. Desperately depressed, I walked out on to a frozen lake, where I came to my senses again. Thank God I was in the countryside at the time and not in the town. The beauty of nature saved me."