UN anti-narcotics chief calls on former Soviet states to step up war on drugs

Warning that drug trafficking bankrolls global terrorism, the head of the United Nations anti-narcotics agency today called on the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union to step up the war on illicit drugs, especially in view of large-scale opium production in nearby Afghanistan.

“On the one hand, the trafficking in Afghan opium in the territories of CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) has a negative effect on the health of the population, like the current catastrophic scale of HIV/AIDS in the region,” Antonio Maria Costa, Executive Director of the UN Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC), told a CIS foreign ministers’ meeting in Yalta, Ukraine.

“On the other, it also nourishes organized crime, laundering of enormous profits from narco-trafficking, and the resulting spread of corruption, illicit trafficking in fire-arms and human beings. All this together is financially fuelling global terrorist operations,” Mr. Costa added.

He offered UNODC technical assistance to CIS and its individual member states in implementing programmes against rugs and crime. “UNODC is expanding its cooperation both with individual countries and with the CIS region as a whole,” he said. “Given the threat posed to national security by drug abuse, drug trafficking and HIV/AIDS, even greater efforts are needed to step up our work in this area.”

So far over $50 million in technical assistance has been provided to governments in the region.