UN: World drug control efforts face huge problems

http://www.salon.com/wires/ap/world/2009/02/25/D96J1JDO0_as_china_drugs/

By ELAINE KURTENBACH Associated Press Writer


Print Feb 25th, 2009 | SHANGHAI -- The world risks losing decades of progress in drug control if it fails to counter the emergence of a criminal market of "staggering proportions," a U.N. official said Thursday.

"I confess I feel somewhat frustrated," Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said following a meeting to commemorate a century of international work on curbing trafficking in opium and other drugs.

Countries should "take control of organized crime far more seriously. Otherwise the accomplishments generated over the past few decades could be undermined," Costa said of the threat from criminal syndicates spreading their reach across almost every continent.


International efforts to curb trading in opium and other narcotics began in 1909 in Shanghai, then China's main hub for the opium trade, with the meeting of the 13-country International Opium Commission.

The delegates meeting Thursday issued a "Shanghai declaration" lauding progress in controlling the trade in opium and its derivatives in the decades that followed that first meeting but urging stronger efforts to combat modern drug scourges.

"We must have the courage to look at the dramatic, unintended consequences of drug control: the emergence of a criminal market of staggering proportions," Costa said. He did not make any specific recommendations at the commemoration.

Countries have so far failed to implement anti-crime measures in a way that has had an impact on the drug trade, he added, describing efforts to curb use of the Internet for drug trafficking and other crimes as "inept to say the least."

The international opium commission did not put an end to opium trafficking in China, which persisted in the chaotic times leading up to the 1949 Communist revolution.

But its decision to begin trying to regulate the opium trade holds a special significance for China, a country whose appetite for the drug left it bankrupted and vulnerable to humiliating defeats by colonial powers.

In the 1950s, China largely eradicated widespread drug use, mostly of opium, along with prostitution and gambling.

But as social controls were loosened in the past several decades, the drug trade in China has flourished. Government statistics put the number of known addicts in China at 1.2 million, including 700,000 heroin users, more than two-thirds of them under the age of 35.

"The achievements made by the international community in drug control remain fragile with a strong possibility of reversing," said Chinese Public Security Minister Meng Jianzhu.

The resurgence in drug abuse has brought with it rising rates of HIV infections, often due to sharing of needles. Last year, AIDS was the top killer among infectious disease, the government reported earlier this month.

In China, heroin and opium come from Burma and Laos and, to a lesser extent, Central Asian nations. Occasional reports say opium is also being cultivated in isolated parts of southern China. Ketamine and menthamphetamines are growing problems.

But the biggest source of opium globally, accounting for 90 percent, remains strife-torn Afghanistan, Costa said.

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U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime: http://www.unodc.org