Russia, Plagued by Heroin Use, to Press U.S. on Destroying Afghan Poppy Crops

During talks this week with his American counterpart, Russia’s top drug enforcement official, Viktor P. Ivanov, will press the United States to step up efforts to destroy Afghan poppy cultivation, which he said was feeding a devastating drug problem in Russia.

The request comes just as American policy makers have swung sharply away from Bush-era programs to eradicate the opium poppy crop, which is used to produce heroin. After a visit to Afghanistan in July, the Obama administration’s special envoy for the region, Richard C. Holbrooke, said poppy eradication had alienated poor farmers and was “driving people into the hands of the Taliban.”

Mr. Ivanov, head of the federal drug control service and a trusted adviser to Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, said Tuesday that eradication programs had failed in Afghanistan because they were too weak, and that the United States should apply the more muscular methods it used recently in Colombia, where vast coca fields were sprayed aerially with the herbicide glyphosate.

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'Sharp drop' in Afghan opium crop

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime says opium cultivation has fallen by 22% in a year and production by 10%, with the biggest fall in Helmand province. But the figures are still higher than three years ago, when British troops began fighting Taliban militants there.

The UN says the drugs trade, which helps fund the insurgency, threatens the legitimacy of the Afghan state. It has called on the international community to sustain progress in Afghanistan, which produces 90% of the world's heroin.

It said 20 of the country's provinces are now poppy-free, but the BBC's Chris Morris in Kabul says that does not mean they are free of the refining and trafficking of drugs. The UN report concludes that the bottom is starting to fall out of the Afghan opium market, with the price of opium at a 10-year low. The UNODC report praised the introduction of UK-backed "food zones", which distribute wheat seed for farmers to plant.

• "The Opium Poppy", Opioids.com.
• "Heroin", DEA.
• "Afghanistan: Opium Winter Assessment", UNDOC.
  

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