3 tonnes of heroin confiscated in Russia last year - FSKN

[lexifer]

18.03.2008, 18.35


MOSCOW, March 18 (Itar-Tass) - Prices of popular brands of narcotics have increased two to three times in the past three years, as Russia stepped up the measures to combat drug trafficking, director of the Federal Service For Control of Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Circulation (FSKN) Viktor Cherkessov said at an expanding meeting of the senior FSKN officials on Tuesday.
"Drug police seized three tonnes of heroin last year. This compares to the amounts confiscated in previous years," he said, adding that to "compensate their losses, the drug mafia has to raise prices of most popular drugs. Prices have skyrocketed two or three times in the past few years," the FSKN director underlined.
FSKN bodies succeeded in overcoming the "galloping rate of increase in the number of people who use drugs."
Whereas it reached 24 percent, on the average, in previous years, this indicator has not exceeded 0.5 percent in the past five years, since the establishment of the FSKN.
Cherkesov noted that according to all-Russian monitoring last year, the number of drug addicts in Russia decreased by 800,000 compared with 2004, and now reaches 5.1 million.
As many as 14,000 crimes and 2,000 administrative offenses were exposed at organizations engaging in the legal turnover of narcotics in 2007.
Russia has more than 29,000 such organizations. They are mostly pharmaceutical and chemical companies.
"Last year, we carried out more tan 11,000 checks at such companies and exposed 14,000 crimes and more than 2,000 administrative offenses," Cherkesov said.
Drug traffickers seek to use substances produced at chemical companies for illegal drug turnover.
In order to intercept this activity, the FSKN created a special control system monitoring domestic and international supplies of narcotic substances.
As an example of success in this field of activity, the FSKN director noted the detection of a channel smuggling acetic anhydride to Afghanistan, a precursor for the production of heroin. The batch seized by drug police could have been used to produce half a tonne of the narcotic.
Taking part in the FSKN session on Tuesday was speaker of the Federation Council upper house of the Russian parliament Sergei Mironov, who called for punishing drug traffickers with life imprisonment with no right of pardon.
"It's an absolutely acceptable measure," Mironov underlined, adding that "authorities should also toughen the penalty for the buyers of drugs."
"Such penalties exist and have shown their effectiveness in the United States, France and other developed countries. "It a matter of the destruction of the gene pool, no more, no less," Mironov said in comments on drug addition problems in the country.
Acting Security Council Secretary Valentin Sobolev warned that drug addition in Russia still posed a threat to the society.
"Law-enforcement bodies have been unable to put up a barrier to the spreading of drug addiction," Sobolev noted at the FSKN meeting.
In this connection, the decision "to set up a state anti-drug committee opens large prospects," he said.
Drug tests would be one of the measures to combat drug abuse, he suggested.
He also called for creating a single database on the persons using drugs (at present, there are several such databases created by different departments).

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