Epress.am News from Armenia
The Armenian Police is by far the most popular source of information on people using narcotic substances and drug trafficking (73.5%); the sources of the rest of the information are mainly other state institutions, and only 1.3% of publications are based on data provided by non-state sources, according to a media monitoring report published today by the Helsinki Citizens Assembly Vanadzor office (HCAV).
Armenia’s Police, the authors note, mainly reported on official meetings in the fight against illicit drug trafficking, radical improvement in this fight, and on providing an advanced training for law enforcement officers in the topic. At the same time, one of the publications on the Police official website referred to the members of the Sasna Tsrer armed group that seized a Yerevan police station in July 2016 and talked about some of them as “drug addicts.”
When reporting on the act of self-immolation committed by Qajik Grigoryan during a demonstration on Yerevan’s Baghramyan Avenue in support of the gunmen, Police again speculated that the man might have been a drug user, the report says.
Having carried out a qualitative content analysis of the information published by state institutions, the authors of the report state that “it lacks necessary attention to health care and social recovery issues; on the other hand, there is an abundance of information on policy of actions similar to criminal prosecution.”