PRESS BRIEFING ON 2002 REPORT OF INTERNATIONAL NARCOTICS CONTROL BOARD

At a Headquarters briefing this afternoon, Herbert Okun, a member of the United Nations International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), launched the 2002 report of the Board with an appeal for international action to help Afghanistan farmers cultivate alternative cash crops to replace opium poppy.

In its report, the Board said addressing the serious drug control situation in Afghanistan needed the full support and cooperation of the international community, in particular, the neighbouring countries.  Preventing the resumption of opium cultivation was closely linked to achieving peace, security and development in Afghanistan, the Board said.

Among its general recommendations, the INCB said the most urgent task facing governments was to ensure that appropriate procedural and substantive laws were introduced at the national level to deal with crimes committed in an electronic environment.  Measures should be harmonized to ensure that offences, sanctions and standards of proof were similar to prevent the growth of data havens.  It urged assistance for developing countries considered at risk from such exploitation.

The INCB also urged giving technical and legislative means to law-enforcement agencies and other national institutions responsible for fighting drug-related crime to develop an appropriate response capacity.  The Board was convinced that the challenges to drug law enforcement could only be met through cooperative partnerships involving governments, the information technology industry, and citizens whose separate interests should be recognized and reconciled.

Mr. Okun said the theme of this year's report was globalization and new technologies, and the challenges they presented to the international drug control conventions.  Drug traffickers and criminal elements tended to be very quick in using those technologies.  The dark side of the World Wide Web was that it had become a vehicle for trading illegal drugs.  There were chat rooms that discussed recipes for making drugs.  The Web had also become a vehicle for money laundering.

He said the Board was not about to call for censorship, but thought that the universality of the Web and of the drug control conventions called for some kind of international and national responses to the problem.  The INCB, in its recommendations, called upon governments, industry, advocacy groups, and health professionals to help regulate the Web in a sensible way.

Mr. Okun said that, because of the drought in Afghanistan last year, heroin production shifted to Myanmar.  Clearly, Afghanistan had the capacity to become the world's largest producer of heroin again.  The Board had been quite active in calling the attention of governments, and particularly the Security Council, to help farmers do other things rather than grow opium poppies.  The United Nations International Drug Control Programme (UNDCP) had been an active partner of the INCB in that effort.

Following discussions with the Taliban authorities and with the Northern Alliance faction last year, the Taliban issued an edict banning opium-poppy cultivation.  The Board found it difficult to determine the level of stocks of

opiates kept in the areas controlled by the Taliban, but it recognized that the continued seizure of opiates in countries surrounding Afghanistan indicated the existence of significant stocks held by a large number of drug-trafficking groups, according to the report.

Since the change of administration in Kabul, there had been steady contacts with the Secretary-General and with the Security Council by the INCB, Mr. Okun said.  The President of the Board and he himself had met last December with the then President of the Security Council, and two weeks ago it had discussions with the current President to raise consciousness on the drug-cultivation problem in Afghanistan.  He hoped action would be taken to wean the peasants of Afghanistan away from cultivation of the opium poppy.  The action had to be "serious and sustained", and he hoped it would happen soon.  The issue at stake was not controversial, he said, adding that the developing countries, the developed ones and countries in the region had an interest in Afghanistan not resuming its place at the head of the list of countries producing heroin.

He said it was not simply the Europeans who were interested in the issue because 90 per cent of the Afghan heroin went to Europe.  Increasing amounts of Afghan heroin went to the Russian Federation.  Both Iran and Pakistan were having serious addiction problems because of their proximity to Afghanistan.  For all those reasons, it was clearly a problem that involved the maintenance of international peace and security.

Other issues discussed in the report included abuse of prescription drugs, legalization and decriminalization of cannabis and the need for research into possible medical uses, if any.  There was also discussion on the increasing use of synthetic drugs that principally went from the developed to the developing world.

Responding to questions about Afghanistan, Mr. Okun said the new Interim Administration there had issued a ban last January on the cultivation of the opium poppy.  But all the reports the Board had received indicated a boom in the cultivation of the crop.  Even if the ban was effective, he said, Afghanistan under the Taliban had a supply of heroin that was estimated to be enough for three to six years, and some had already been unloaded.  The problem was very real, he said.

He told a questioner that Iran had been fighting against the drug problem fiercely.  Eighty per cent of the world's seizures of poppy and 90 per cent of heroin were carried out in Iran.  The country also had a very large addiction problem.  The same situation prevailed in Pakistan, he said, except that the Pakistani Government was not quite so fierce in fighting the traffickers.  It certainly opposed them, but it also had a large and growing population of heroin addicts.  Ten years ago, heroin addiction was hardly heard of in Pakistan; now there were millions of heroin addicts there. 

The situation on the north in Tajikistan and Turkmenistan was more complicated.  Those had become trafficking routes, both into the Russian Federation and to Western Europe.  The Tajik/Afghan border was patrolled by Russian units and those seized a lot of the heroin.  He suspected the Tajiks themselves seized very little.  In Turkmenistan, much more had to be done to stop the flow. 

Poppy started growing again last year in Lebanon, he replied to another question.  It had stopped for several years, but now there were indications that it had resumed, although not on a very large scale.

Addressing a question about legalizing marijuana in the United States, he said that was really a "false" issue because marinol -– the substance that produced the "high" upon smoking marijuana –- had been a legal prescription drug in the United States for about 30 years.

With poppies blooming and the harvest about to occur, along with the huge stockpiles he had described, was he anticipating a massive influx of heroin into Europe and elsewhere?  Also with drug control tentative in Afghanistan, how could the United Nations evolve a solution leading to the eradication of poppy production?

He said that there would be more stuff flowing out.  That was a tough problem; people profited from it and that was not a question about the drug being legal or illegal.  Wherever there was a high value and fungible product, people would profit from it.  The problem was not impossible; it was impossible to stop, but it was possible to reduce it.  The fact that countries were corrupt and poorly governed directly and powerfully affected the people of a region.

To a question on whether there would be a surge of heroin in Europe, he said that depended on how much was harvested and the level of international cooperation, above all, with Iran, Pakistan and the neighbouring countries.  Helping Mr. Karzai and everybody in the region meant "getting on the problem right now".

The financing of terrorism was not unrelated to the financing of drug traffickers, he said to a question about pressure on the banking industry.  There was pressure, he added, but there should be more.

Asked why the United States lost a seat on the Drug Control Board, given its involvement in prosecution and consumption, he said that was unfortunate.  That was a secret ballot, so he had not really known the motivation of the voters.  The United States played a useful role on both the Human Rights Commission and on the Drug Control Board.  "It's a pity we're not on the Board", he added.

In response to a question about the specific link between drug problems and international peace and security, he said that the case of Afghanistan was clear.  But look at Colombia:  the cocoa-producing regions there were largely run by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which for more than 40 years had seriously destabilized the country.  Weapons purchases came from the cocaine trade.  Since marijuana was so widespread, it was harder to pinpoint its destabilizing influence, whereas that was much clearer in the case of cocoa and heroin. 

Was the Board trying to get some kind of Security Council resolution specifically related to the drug problem in Afghanistan, a correspondent asked, and if so, what did he want it to say?

He replied that what the Board had asked for when it first wrote to the Council President last November was not a specific resolution, but simply that the problem of opium/poppy cultivation of heroin be included in any resolution or presidential statement about Afghanistan.  The language it had suggested was that Afghanistan should be a signatory to the 1960 Convention, should live up to its promise, and that the international community should and must help the Afghan Government, whether interim or permanent. 

There were millions of heroin addicts worldwide, he replied to a further question.  Drug production had played a large role for the Taliban.  Because of the unsettled conditions in Afghanistan beginning in the early 1990s, traffickers quickly shifted the sources of supply to Afghanistan, so that, almost immediately, Afghanistan became the world's largest producer of heroin in the early 1990s and remained so under the Taliban.  Two months after the INCB wrote to the Taliban and the Northern Alliance saying they would be expelled from the Treaty regime, as they were in flagrant violation, the Taliban issued a communiqué saying it was banning the cultivation of opium poppy -– meanwhile sitting on a five-year supply of heroin.  "We didn't take that exactly as the best response; I mean, it was a nice response" -- and production went down by about 10 per cent. 

Soon after, the worst drought in decades further reduced production.  But to the question about whether heroin flourished under the Taliban, the answer was clearly yes.  Under the Taliban, there was never a drug seizure in Afghanistan; not one single case.  It was safe to conclude, therefore, that the Taliban police force was not really interested in seizing heroin.  They were very complicit in that whole business.  Attempts to portray efforts in that regard were basically a "con job", since the drought really performed that task for them.

As Afghanistan's drug production dwindled, Myanmar would resume its place as the world's largest producer, he said to another question.  The Government of Myanmar fought it, and most of the drug production was on the Chinese/Lao/Thai border in inaccessible areas.  That was very much related to the old problem of the exiled Chinese Nationalist soldiers, who in 1949 went into northern Burma.  To keep up their fight against the army of Mao Zedong, they began to grow the drug.  It was a very complicated situation. 

Typically, countries that seized heroin either destroyed it or used it for medical experiments, he said to another question.  Sometimes, they tried to sell it as an opiate, a medicine.  Iran, for example, frequently sought to sell its seized heroin legally.  The Board opposed that reselling, even legally, because legal opium stocks held in the world now were very high.  The five countries allowed under the Convention to grow poppies legally for medicinal purposes were India, Turkey, Australia, France and Spain.  Since stocks were high, the Board did not wish to add to that list. 

Where was South Asia placed in the scheme of things? another correspondent asked.

The sub-continent was very vulnerable, as it was physically located between the two principal heroin-growing areas:  the golden triangle and Afghanistan.  So it was vulnerable to transit and the efforts of traffickers to increase their market by getting kids addicted early.  That was what he was seeing in Pakistan.  India had been largely successful in struggling against the problem, but there was a special reason for South Asia to be concerned.

Israel was cited about one year ago as one of the prime money-laundering centres, along with Russia, the Cayman Islands, and several islands in the

Pacific, he replied to another question.  He did not know if they had "cleaned up their act" since then. 

To a question about who would clean up the problem in Afghanistan, he said that, logically, that would be the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).  He had had the opportunity to discuss that informally with UNDP Administrator Mark Malloch Brown, who was "very alive" to the problem and very positive about doing something about it.  The growing regions were not so much the central mountains but the North and the West, where there was mile after mile of poppy.   He was not aware of any heroin stockpiles that had been destroyed as a result of the United States bombing, but that was difficult to know because they were well hidden in the first place.

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