- Opiates - and cannabis - produced in Afghanistan now
transit through Iraq before being distributed in Europe. Their consumption
is growing in Baghdad and elsewhere.
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- Repeat yet again. Although Washington took the lead thirty
years ago in the global anti-drug war, narcotics seem to stubbornly want
to surge through the wake of the American Army.
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- Thus, in 2001, following the prohibition of poppy cultivation
by the Taliban, Afghanistan had seen its opium production fall by 185 tons...
to shoot up to 3,200 tons (or a 1,700% increase) immediately after the
United States' intervention, a scenario that is finding an echo today in
Iraq. According to the Iranian Hamid Ghodse, President of the OICS (Organe
international de contrôle des stupéfiants, an expert group
headquartered in Vienna charged with applying UN conventions relating to
drugs), Iraq is in the process of becoming an important transit country
on the route for Afghan heroin. Opiates and cannabis produced in Afghanistan
"are brought through Iraq to Jordan from where they are sent on to
the European markets of the East and West," he declared during a press
conference given Thursday in Vienna.
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- This tendency is confirmed by the rise in narcotics seizures
along the Iraqi-Jordanian border the last twelve months. "This situation
is made possible by the domestic situation in Iraq, where border controls
have been loosened and traffickers can come through disguised as pilgrims"
going to the great Shiite cities, propounded Hamid Ghodse, for whom the
situation is comparable to that of most countries emerging from a conflict
situation.
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- While drug problems have been historically unknown in
Iraq (out of fear of repression striking traffickers and consumers or quite
simply from lack of information), OICS has worried about the new trend
since its March 2004 annual report. "Drugs have started to enter the
country in huge quantities, notably through the Eastern border," with
Iran, revealed Iraqi Minister of the Interior Nouri Badrane then, who worried
especially about the increase in narcotics consumption among young Iraqis:
"Consumption of these drugs is on the rise, due to unemployment, insecurity,
and the sense of uncertainty about the future, especially among young people."
A few months later, his equivalent at the Health Ministry talked about
"a problem that has become endemic," submitting a number of 2,029
registered addicts.
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- A trend confirmed this year by Hamid Ghodse, who, on
Thursday, inventoried a troubling increase in the number of addicts treated
in the capital's hospitals, but also in other cities in the country. To
confront the situation, Baghdad has adopted a national anti-narcotics plan.
"It's urgent that the Iraqi government and the international community
take the preventative measures the situation requires before it becomes
worse," Hamid Ghodse concluded.
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- A deterioration that Washington, which for the moment
has other priorities, could also pay the price for. If drug consumption
by GIs is not at present the subject of any study, the highlight of the
June 2004 edition of the magazine "High Times" (specializing
in cannabis) was a GI in Iraq posing next to a cannabis plant. In 1971,
11% of GIs based in Vietnam declared that they consumed heroin regularly,
while one in five said that they had tried it.[1] It was following their
return to the United States that Nixon decided to launch his global war
on drugs.
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- http://www.banderasnews.com/0506/hb-heroinroute.htm
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