Levantamento em Bissau associado ao narcotráfico

Washington/Vienna - Opiate and cocaine use is on the rise in developing countries as drug consumption is stabilizing in richer regions, the UN drug control agency said Wednesday in its annual report.

Global supply of these two types of drugs continued to fall last year, according to the report issued in Washington by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Heroin production dropped 13 per cent to 657 tons, owing to decreases from Afghanistan and Myanmar. As large amounts of the precursor product opium were stockpiled, only 430 tons reached drug markets.

Coca cultivation went down 5 per cent to 158,000 hectares last year. But only Colombia reported decreasing acreage, while production area went up in Peru and Bolivia.

"Poor countries are not in a position to absorb the consequences of increased drug use," UNODC executive director Antonio Maria Costa said. "The developing world faces a looming crisis that would enslave millions to the misery of drug dependence."

Cocaine use increased in South America, while heroin consumption is booming in Eastern Africa, according to the report by the Vienna- based agency.

Meanwhile, the production and consumption of synthetic drugs increased in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

On a global scale, there are more users of synthetic amphetamines than users of cocaine and opiates combined.

The scale shifted further toward synthetic drugs in 2008, the latest year for which the UNODC provided data.

"We will not solve the world drugs problem if we simply push addiction from cocaine and heroin to other addictive substances - and there are unlimited amounts of them, produced in mafia labs at trivial costs," Costa warned.

Costa highlighted growing consumption in developing countries and focused on the destructive role of the drug trade on security and politics in poorer regions.

While mentioning drug-related violence in Mexico, the report pointed out that murder rates were even higher in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

In Guinea-Bissau in Western Africa, April's mutiny was also connected to the cocaine trade blighting the country, according to the UNODC.

"Measures must be taken to assure that transnational organized crime does not contribute to instability, including, when relevant, building crime prevention into international efforts to foster peace and the rule of law," the report said.


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