Interfax: Afghanistan will pose drug threat for another century -FSKN director

MINSK/MOSCOW. Nov 29 (Interfax) – Russian Federal Drug Control Service Director Viktor Ivanov said Afghanistan may stay a source of large-scale drug trafficking for years ahead.

“If no serious efforts are made by the world and the UN, all conditions and preconditions have been created for the prolongation of the large-scale drug production in the coming decades, if not a century,” Ivanov said at a meeting of the Council of the Anti-Narcotics Agencies of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) held in Minsk on Thursday.

“The destabilizing effect of transnational drug trafficking, which is destructive to Eurasia, is guarantees for decades ahead,” Ivanov said.

“The situation in Afghanistan is determined not only by the schedule and schemes for the withdrawal of the foreign military contingents, but primarily by the gigantic drug production infrastructure created in the years of the military presence and the social foundation of the drug economy, which was deformed to suit those purposes in a situation of total unemployment,” Ivanov said.

“The fortyfold increase in the production of hard drugs in Afghanistan has resulted in a complete disruption of the security system in Eurasia and became a long-term dominating factor affecting the formation of the turbulent political landscape in the Eastern Hemisphere,” he said.

Ivanov earlier criticized NATO, specifically, the U.S., for not taking any actions to combat heroin production in Afghanistan.

FSKN said the heroin flow into Russia increased after Russian border guards left the Tajik-Afghan border in 2005.

According to FSKN, thousands of people die of drug abuse in Russia every year, 8.5 million people do drugs regularly or from time to time in Russia, and 18.5 million Russian citizens have tried drugs at least once in their life.