By IPS Correspondents
BRUSSELS, Jun 25 2004 (IPS)

The illicit production of opium in Afghanistan is a “time bomb” waiting to hit Europe, says a new report by the United Nations drugs agency..

Production of opium in Afghanistan is expected to increase this year and will have a significant knock-on effect in Europe, says the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Last year Afghanistan produced 3,600 tonnes of opium (the second highest opium production in the country’s history), worth an estimated 1.2 billion dollars, says the UNODC World Drug Report 2004 released Friday.

Although the global illicit production of opium (from which heroin is made) has remained stable in recent years – around 4,000 to 5,000 tonnes – production has become increasingly concentrated in Afghanistan, which along with Myanmar and Laos produces more than 90 percent of the world’s opium.

The UNODC highlights the effect the Afghanistan production will have on the drug culture in the rest of the world. “The fate of the world heroin market will largely depend on what happens in that country,” the report says. Production in Myanmar and Laos is continuing to decline.

“The real problem we have at the moment is Afghanistan,” Thomas Pietschmann, research officer at UNODC told IPS. “With a time lag of about one year, we must expect that the heroin manufactured out of this opium will enter Western Europe. This will be a significant challenge to all the positive developments experienced in Western Europe over the last few years. This is an early warning of potentially difficult times ahead.”

In 2002 some 3,400 tonnes of opium was produced in Afghanistan. This increased to 3,600 tonnes the following year. This year, Pietschmann says the increase over last year is expected to be “dramatic”.

The report also points to a gradual shift in the movement of drugs to developing countries.

“Taking into account trends in cultivation, production and consumption, the global heroin market is shifting away from developed countries and towards transition and some developing countries,” Antonio Mario Costa, chief executive director of UNODC said in a statement.

Although the drug problem, which affects 185 million people worldwide – 3 percent of the global population or 4.2 percent of the population aged 15 years to 64 – has increased slightly since the last 2000 report (which recorded a total of 180 million people), the report says that the “spread of drug use may be losing momentum.”

Developed countries have been experiencing a steady decline in drug use recently. The number of drug related deaths, mostly due to heroin, fell almost 20 percent between 2000 and 2002 and there are also indications that the injecting of drugs has been stable or decreasing over the last few years in most countries in Western Europe.

Pietschmann says this is one of the most positive findings of the report.

“Notably the markets of North America have shown a stabilisation of drug use in recent years,” he said. But there are also positive signs for Europe. The massive upward trends of cocaine and synthetic drugs, which Western Europe experienced over the last decade, appears to have come to a halt in a number of West European countries. Heroin abuse continues to remain stable or decline.”

There is an exception, however. The report notes that the consumption of cannabis is spreading at “an accelerated pace.”

New estimates say cannabis is the most widely used drug in the world with close to 150 million people taking it.

This is followed by amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS), with some 30 million users of amphetamines, primarily methamphetamine and amphetamine, and eight million on ecstasy.

Slightly more than 13 million people use cocaine, while some 15 million people use opiates, namely heroin, morphine, opium and synthetic opiates.

In terms of health impact measured by the demand for treatment services, opiates remain the most serious problem in the world, accounting for 67 percent of drug treatment in Asia and 61 percent in Europe.

The amount of illicit drugs seized over the past ten years has increased, with ecstasy, depressants and ATS drugs showing the strongest increases, the report says.

Cannabis remains the most frequently seized substance and in 2002 accounted for 99 percent of all seizures in Africa. In the Americas cocaine-type substances recorded the highest percentage of seizures (31 percent in 2002), while Asia was first for the number of opiate seizures (43 percent in the same year).

Pietschmann says this is due to an increase in the number of cases reported.. “More countries reported their seizure cases to UNODC and the countries which reported their seizures in the mid 1990s reported an increase. There was a general improvement of enforcement activities around the world, as well as an increasing globalisation of the markets.”

The report points to the broader implications of the drug problem, including the spread of HIV/AIDS and other diseases, money laundering, corruption and financing of insurgents and terrorists.

Pietschmann says that one of the main problems is that in many countries drug control is still a low priority.

“Resources used for drug control are thus low, both on the supply side, and even more so on the demand side,” he said. “In addition, a better understanding of the markets is required. This is necessary to optimise the result of interventions.”

Despite efforts by the UNODC to learn more about drugs in developing countries, there remain huge “terras incognitas” in drug-related data and statistics due to a lack of funding, says Pietschmann.

The report says little is known about the structure and dynamics of drug markets at national, regional and global levels. “There is a pressing need to fill that knowledge gap in order to develop more synergistic drug control strategies,” the report says. “The deficiency of compartmentalised sectorial and geographical approaches must be addressed.”

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