Heroin threatens Russia, official says
MOSCOW - Russia has become the world's biggest heroin consumer, and the flood of the drug from Afghanistan poses a threat to national security, Russia's drug enforcement chief said yesterday.
Viktor Ivanov said the international community's failure to uproot poppy plantations in Afghanistan, as envisaged by a 10-year UN plan adopted in 1998, has caused heroin to flood into Russia across Central Asia's porous borders.
"In recent years Russia has not just become massively hooked on Afghan opiates, it has also become the world's absolute leader in the opiate trade and the number one heroin consumer," Ivanov said in a report made available to reporters.
Ivanov, head of the Federal Drug Control Service, said 90 percent of Russian addicts now take Afghan heroin, and the drug is partly to blame for rising crime and a fall in Russia's population.
Russia will press for a tough action plan on Afghanistan at a high-level meeting of the UN-sponsored Commission on Narcotic Drugs to be held in Vienna next week, he said.
"Our people are dying. Some 90 percent of drug addicts in Russia are on Afghan heroin," Ivanov said. "This is a threat to national security and to our country's society."
Afghanistan, which produces 93 percent of the world's heroin, has been ravaged by decades of civil war and a US-led international coalition is currently battling an Islamist insurgency. 