In the Late 1960s, while traveling to India, the “Fab Four” were introduced to the idea that they could take drugs to “expand their minds”. However, on their return, they inadvertently brought with them the idea that the common man could in fact make a profit from the business of dealing and transporting substances, like LSD and Marijuana.
The Russians, in the midst of the Cold War, and with it, economic depression, decided to make major business out of selling drugs to the general public, starting problems of addiction and abuse. Yevgeny Bryun, the medical chief of Eastern Europe, claims that “After the Beatles traveled to expand their consciousness in Indian ashrams, they brought the idea of changing one’s psychic state to the people” (Daily Mail).
Bryun also noted that drug takers would end up in prison, or dead, if they did not curb their habits. Drug abuse has been one of Russia’s greatest problems over the past few decades.
To blame a country’s problems on a group that disbanded over forty years ago is ridiculous, but in 2004, Sir Paul McCartney, who has just recently given up cannabis, admitted that the Beatles’ music was ‘informed’ by drugs, and that he didn’t have any intentions of personally introducing hard drugs to people.
Although Bryun is blaming Russia’s problems on the Fab Four, there is almost no possibility of a boycott of their music, as when McCartney played at Red Square in 2003, he met with Russian premier Vladimir Putin, who said the band’s music had been “a gulp of freedom” to the youth of the country during the 60s.
