Russia says US-led forces should stem Afghan heroin

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A top Russian drugs official said on Friday Moscow should stop the transport of cargo
across its territory to US-led forces in Afghanistan if they do not do more to cut the flow of heroin to Russia.
Earlier this year, Russia and its former Soviet allies in Central Asia established a transit route for non-lethal
supplies to the international forces in Afghanistan to complement a dangerous route via Pakistan.
Russia and its allies have become increasingly concerned at the growth in drug traffic from Afghanistan since
the overthrow of the Taliban.
They say it poses a grave regional security threat and has caused a heroin epidemic in Russia, which now ranks
as the world’s No.1 consumer of Afghan heroin.
“The granting of transport corridors to NATO forces in Afghanistan should be conditioned on a commitment to
destroy sown areas, laboratories, stocks and other infrastructure of the Afghan drug business,” Russia’s drug
enforcement chief Viktor Ivanov told a meeting with ministers and parliamentarians.
“This would ... start the real process of improving the drug situation in Russia as well as in Central Asian and
European countries.”
Citing United Nations data, Ivanov said Afghanistan’s output of opiates had grown more than 40-fold since 2001
when the US-led coalition launched its assault on the Taliban.
He said the 2008 raw opium crop totalled over 7,000 tonnes. “The UN programme on fighting drugs has been a
failure. Today Afghanistan produces twice as much opiates as the whole world 10 years ago,” Ivanov said.