Drug dealing in Russia works through a series of dead drops. You place an order over Telegram or the dark web and receive directions to a secret stash, or a "treasure", hidden somewhere in your city.

Synthetic stimulants such as mephedrone or speed are the most popular - cheaply and easily-produced within Russia, they've far outpaced organic highs such as heroin and cocaine, which must be smuggled from abroad.

Secreting these secret stashes is an army of couriers, or "treasure-men", paid several hundred rubles for planting each package.

"My chemical journey began with pink amphetamines in the summer of 2018," remembered Torchebus, who chronicles as a "narco-blogger" on Telegram.

"A couple of times, no more. However, in the fall of '18 I'd already tried mephedrone, and off we went. After some time, about 5-6 months, I started selling a little hand-to-hand… And in the summer of 2019, I got a job as a treasure-man. [By 2021] I was transporting cocaine to Moscow City."

Russia has the largest prison population in Europe, around a third of whom are there on drugs charges. This includes both ageing heroin addicts, as well as young Russians in their teenage years or early 20s who've been roped into burying "treasure." The penalty can be as harsh as three-five years for possession, or 9-16 for distribution.

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However, in recent years the imprisoned population has fallen sharply - halving from over 860,000 in 2010 to some 433,000 - with a record 54,000 released in 2023 alone.

Has the nation which gave the world the gulag had a change of heart? Not quite.

In 2022, Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the mercenary outfit Wagner and himself an ex-con, toured penitentiaries, promising inmates freedom if they enlisted, but warning not everyone would come back in one piece. Many were thrown straight in the fray.

In August 2023, Prigozhin suspiciously perished in a plane crash after leading a mutiny and Wagner was disbanded, but convict recruitment continued via the Russian army, with pardons signed by Vladimir Putin.

The two most common types of convict soldier were serving time for murder, and article 228 of the criminal code - narcotics. In other words, Russia's war on drugs has created a surplus of manpower for the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

On paper, small quantities for personal consumption are decriminalised in Russia - up to six grams of cannabis should result in a fine, not jail. So it's curious, statistically, Moscow's finest often find just enough drugs to lay a serious charge - and enough to convince potential bribe-payers into a trip to the ATM for an "on-the-spot fine".

Less often, crimes are staged for political reasons.

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"I imagined a situation where I'd be singled-out for writing the truth, but rather I thought I'd be killed. I didn't imagine that I'd be detained and sent to prison on a drug charge," Chechen journalist Zhalaudi Geriyev told Byline Times.

Geriyev was reporting for local news site Caucasian Knot when, in 2016, he was dragged off a minibus by a group of men, taken to the woods and tortured with a plastic bag over his head before being driven to a cemetery where police were waiting.

"They reached into [my] backpack and pulled out a black bag where there were 170-180 grams of marijuana… They never told me the specific reason [why I was targeted], but they told me I was working against the authorities, an enemy of the people… and that I should be glad I have not been executed but simply imprisoned, during which time I should be re-educated and grateful for this second chance," he explained.

Geriyev spent the next three years in a prison camp.

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