According to a Russian health official, the youth of his country have a major drug problem - and it all goes back to those darn Beatles.
"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," argued Yevgeny Bryun, the Russian Ministry of Health’s chief alcohol and drug abuse specialist, during a Moscow press conference reported by London’s Daily Telegraph.
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When business understood that you could trade on that – on pleasure and goods associated with pleasure – that’s probably where it all began," continued Bryun, who went on to discuss the "
tough measures" needed to curtail the lingering effects of Beatlemania.
As the Telegraph notes, The Beatles were banned for a period in the U.S.S.R., following a decree by the nation’s state-run record label that "musicians such as these, who have plunged to the depth of musical decline, do not deserve a place on Soviet records."
A new ban seems unlikely, however - especially given that current Russian president Vladimir Putin is a self-avowed Beatle fan, and after Paul McCartney played Red Square in 2003, Putin told him that the band's music had been "like a gulp of freedom" to Soviet youth in the '60s.
Thanks for the report to UltimateClassicRock.com.
