Drug abuse: a social and economic threat.

The dimensions of drug abuse are so enormous that Governments around the world have launched unparalleled counter-offensives against trafficking. But some countries' toleration of so-called "soft" drugs in efforts to contain "hard" ones has led to an increase in abuse of both.

The report paints a picture of drug abuse spreading rapidly on an international basis. Health hazards are being aggravated by multiple use of opiates, cocaine, cannabis and a variety of psychotropic substances (man-made drugs), as well as by the "increasingly perilous means" by which they are taken. Illegal drug production and trafficking financed by organized crime is so pervasive that the economies of entire countries "are disrupted, legal institutions menaced and the very security of some States threatened."

Whenever illicit cultivation, production and trafficking occur, the report observes, "abuse among local populations nearly always ensues. This accounts for the spread of drug abuse geographically beyond the few countries which were once the main centres of such abuse. The fact is that very few countries now remain unaffected."

In Western Europe, the number of addicts, even among the very young, is rising dramatically. Heroin seizures for 1983 were 1.6 tons--up 40 per cent over 1982--while cannabis seizures increased by one third, to an all-time high of 112 tons. The growing abuse of cocaine in the region was demonstrated by the fact that more than a ton was confiscated in 1983, compared with less than a kilo 15 years ago.

Statistics for the first seven months of 1984 showed that some 70 per cent of the heroin seized in Western Europe and more than half of that in North America came from the Near and Middle East. In addition, local demand by the more than 1 million opium and heroin addicts in Iran and Pakistan alone is estimated to total 500-800 tons of opium annually. Size and frequency of seizures from the region continue to increase, with interceptions now being made in transit countries previously unaffected.

Despite this trend, INCB points out the incongruity that, with the exception of Pakistan, no other country in the region has reported any significant illegal opium-poppy farming. While three-and-a-half tons of heroin, more than a ton of morphine and 35 tons of opium were seized in its eastern border provinces, Iranian authorities, for examples, state that no opium cultivation exists in the country. The Board has, therefore, urged countries concerned to...