IRKUTSK, Russia, Dec 18 (AFP) - In a snow-covered forest outside the Siberian city of Irkutsk, three former heroin addicts have taken over an old Soviet-era pioneer camp to try and help others to kick their habit.

Irkut, financed entirely by donations from parents of young drug users, runs year-long residential rehabilitation courses for up to 20 people a year, and has a 50 percent success rate.

But one of only two such centres in the region, it represents a drop in the ocean.

The scale of the drugs problem in Irkutsk, which has fuelled an epidemic of the HIV virus that leads to AIDS because infected addicts are sharing contaminated needles, has mushroomed in the past two years.

Vitaly Shmurov, a leading expert on drug abuse, pointed to the massive changes since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 as the main factor: the moral vacuum in Russia's post-Communist society.

"It's always hard, always painful. In any country which has undergone such upheavals, when everything changes too quickly it's bad," he said.

The opening up of borders has also led to a flood of opium and heroin from Afghanistan, according to Shmurov.

Official statistics show 10,000 registered drug users in Irkutsk and the surrounding region, where three million people live.

But experts estimate that between a quarter and a third of young people aged from 15 to 25 are regularly using drugs.

"Many young people are in a very difficult situation because they don't know what values to choose," commented Shmurov, who heads a non-governmental anti-drugs organisation and also works in this field under an official guise.

"When someone makes having a good time his main objective in life it is a sign that he is not happy, he has no other values.

"Tolstoy wrote that the search for pleasure is a form of self-destruction, he was right," he added.

Galina, an attractive dark-haired woman in her mid-40s, spoke shamefacedly about her only son, Liosha, who has been addicted to heroin for the past two years and is HIV positive.

"Our son is a drug addict. Today he went off to shoot up, he's just a 20- year-old boy. I can't stand it, I just can't stand it," she said her voice breaking with emotion.

His father an alcoholic, Liosha was always a weak-willed boy according to his mother.

Twice his parents kept him at home under lock and key for ten days to try and get him off drugs, but his girlfriend smuggled in doses of heroin to him.

Liosha now injects himself in full view of his mother, and has stolen most things in their apartment to finance his habit.

Another HIV positive drug addict's mother, Ludmilla, 49, her hands trembling, showed a photograph of her 23-year-old son when he was a young schoolboy.

"I may not survive for much longer as I may die because of my son, and this daughter of mine, this small girl may be left alone in the world," she said pointing to a picture of a smiling 13-year-old girl.

"She may go down the same path, or even worse, my dockha (my darling daughter)," Ludmilla said with a look of anguish.

Overwhelmed by her tragedy, Ludmilla veered between desperate love and anger.

"I told him once: 'Go and hang yourself, take an overdose, you love Anya and me, do something,'" she said. "What can I do, kill him?"

But then with indignation she recounted how a female doctor had advised her to forget that her son existed.

"I answered 'How can I forget him, when I gave birth to him, breast-fed him. How can I forget him? When he dies, until the end of my life I will remember him, that he's my child.'"

Pavel, 23, who is 10 months into the rehabilitation course, said he began experimenting with drugs for a kick.

"I soon got hooked. You can spend up to 2,000 rubles (70 dollars) a day. You feel pain everywhere in your body, it seems unbearable, you have only one thought: how to find your next fix," he said.

"I tried to give up, in hospital they remove the physical addiction, but the mental dependance doesn't go away," Pavel added.

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