The Beatles Were Once Blamed for an Entire Country’s Rampant Drug Problem

In 2012, The Beatles hadn’t been together for 43 years. However, they still found themselves on the receiving end of a complaint. Yevgeny Bryun, the Russian Ministry of Health’s chief alcohol and drug abuse specialist, alleged that The Beatles were responsible for the country’s overwhelming drug problem.

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“After The Beatles went to expand their consciousness in India ashrams, they introduced that idea – the changing of one’s psychic state of mind using drugs – to the population,” Bryun claimed at the time during a press conference in Moscow.

“When business understood that you could trade on that – on pleasure and goods associated with pleasure – that’s probably where it all began,” he continued.

According to Bryun, Russia needed to take “tough measures” to curb the lasting influence of The Beatles. In 2012, overdoses and drug-related deaths doubled in Moscow. The main cause, according to Vyacheslav Davydov of Moscow’s Federal Drug Control Service, was homemade and inferior quality drugs.

The Beatles Were Once Banned in Russia in the 1960s, but Citizens Still Listened

In the 1960s, The Beatles and other Western artists were banned in the U.S.S.R. for a time. Apparently, “musicians such as these, who have plunged to the depth of musical decline, do not deserve a place on Soviet records.” The statement came from a Russian state-run record label and effectively banned the music in the country.

However, Russian citizens were still listening to The Beatles. In an episode of his podcast in 2023, Paul McCartney recalled his memory of the ban.

“Everyone in Russia goes back to The Beatles period and remembers having to smuggle records, or it was all very you know, little rooms where you could play and you didn’t want people to know,” he said.

“You didn’t want the authorities to know that you were listening to this forbidden group, which, really, we loved the idea of that, that we were getting smuggled along with Levi’s jeans. This was like true cultural arrival,” McCartney continued.

While the Ministry of Health once decried The Beatles, there wasn’t any new ban on the horizon at that time. The Beatles were accepted in Russia after the ban was lifted in the 80s. Additionally, Russian President and self-proclaimed Beatles fan Vladimir Putin even praised Paul McCartney. He spoke positively of the band’s influence after McCartney played the Red Square in 2003.

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