....RUSSIA is hotting up as well.Remember, SBN's partner MEDINAT...

....RUSSIA is hotting up as well.

Remember, SBN's partner MEDINAT has commenced the approval process for Oraline in Russia. The timing looks impeccable - based on this fascinating press feature from a few weeks back. Just an extract. Follow the link for full story. EXCITING STUFF!

Date:04/02/2008 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2008/02/04/stories/2008020453271000.htm


Russia: victim of narco-aggression


Vladimir Radyuhin

The U.S.-led NATO forces have not only failed to eliminate the terrorist threat from the Taliban but have also presided over a spectacular rise in opium production in Afghanistan.


Afghanistan’s narcotics have struck Russia like a tsunami threatening to decimate its already shrinking population. In a country of 142 million people, there are about 6 million drug-users — a 20-fold increase since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Overwhelmed by a flood of drugs from Afghanistan, Russia says it has fallen victim to “narco-aggression.”

The illegal drug turnover in Russia is estimated to be between $10 billion and $15 billion, discounting transit trafficking. The Federal Drug Control Service said earlier this month that as many as 30 million to 40 million people in Russia may have tried drugs at least once. Annually, some 80,000 Russians die of drug-related causes. One in five crimes committed in Russia is related to drugs.

Narcotics have become an integral part of the youth subculture. In Moscow alone, narcotics are sold at about 100 discothèques and cafes frequented by the young, the city drug control service reported last month. About 45 per cent of Russian university students use drugs, according to Russian Minister for Education and Science Andrei Fursenko. He described the situation as “critical.” The Moscow city government plans to introduce mandatory drug tests for all students in the Russian capital this year. Schoolchildren may be next in line for screening: some surveys indicate that four out of five young Russians are familiar with drugs. The Russian Parliament is planning to discuss a law to allow compulsory treatment of drug and alcohol addicts.

President Vladimir Putin has described the drug abuse problem in Russia as a “national calamity.” The catastrophic rise in drug addiction in Russia has been spurred by the painful transition from socialism to capitalism that Russia has been going through since 1991. But external factors have played a crucial role. Last year, Mr. Putin bluntly stated that Russia and Europe faced “narco-aggression.”

The disintegration of the Soviet Union in December 1991 threw open the floodgates of drug trafficking from Afghanistan across Central Asia to Russia and further west to Europe. Overnight, Russia lost control over nearly 5,000 km of former Soviet borders in Central Asia and the Caucasus. At the same time, nearly 8,000 km of what used to be internal nominal boundaries between ex-Soviet republics became Russia’s new state borders.

In 1993, Russian border guards returned to Tajikistan in an effort to contain the flow of drugs from opium-producing Afghanistan. In 2002 alone, they intercepted 6.7 tonnes of drugs, half of them heroin. However in 2005, Tajik President Imomali Rakhmon, hoping to win financial aid from the U.S., asked the Russian border guards to leave, saying Tajikistan had recovered enough from a 1992-97 Civil War to shoulder the task. Within months of the Russian withdrawal, cross-border drug trafficking increased manifold.

Turkmenistan, another major opium route from Afghanistan, threw out Russian border guards in 1999. Since 2000, it has reported no drug seizures to international organisations. President Saparmurat Niyazov who died last year claimed his country had no drug problem. However, independent surveys indicate that up to half of Turkmenistan’s male population uses drugs. In 2002, the country’s Prosecutor-General Kurbanbibi Atadzhanova was arrested for operating a drug trafficking ring.

Seventeen years after the break-up of the Soviet Union, borders between the newly independent states are still porous and travel is visa-free. Air passengers arriving from Central Asia are routinely screened for drugs in Russian airports but if drugs are shipped by land, there is only a remote chance of their getting intercepted.

According to the Federal Drug Control Service, 90 per cent of the heroin sold in Russia comes from Afghanistan. In 2000, the Taliban banned poppy plantations and the next year opium production dipped to an all-time low level of 185 tonnes. However, since the U.S.-led invasion, the poppy fields have mushroomed again. According to the United Nations authority on drugs and crime, last year Afghanistan produced 8,200 tonnes of opium, enough to make a stunning 93 per cent of the world’s heroin.

When Russia backed the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan to crush the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda in the post-9/11 scenario, it least expected drug trafficking from Afghanistan to assume gargantuan proportions under the U.S. military. The U.S.-led NATO forces have not only failed to eliminate the terrorist threat from the Taliban but have also presided over a spectacular rise in opium production. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Afghanistan was tottering on the brink of becoming a “narco state.”

Narco business has emerged as virtually the only economy of Afghanistan valued at some $10 billion a year. Opium trade is estimated by the U.N. to be equivalent to 53 per cent of the country’s official economy, and it is helping to finance the Taliban.

“Unfortunately, they (NATO) are doing nothing to reduce the narcotic threat from Afghanistan even a tiny bit,” Mr. Putin angrily remarked three years ago. He accused the coalition forces of “sitting back and watching caravans haul drugs across Afghanistan to the former Soviet Union and Europe.”