The global drug trade is booming, fuelled by the demand from more than 200 million people worldwide who used illegal narcotics last year, new reports show.
According to an as-yet-unpublished UN report, despite multi-billion-pound anti-drug measures that have restricted some supplies, the market is as insatiable as ever.
"We have shown that drugs control policies can work in terms of supply -- but demand is a very different matter," said a spokesperson from the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
A second new report, issued by the US State Department, confirms the UN picture of a world using more drugs than ever. Though narcotic use has stabilized in North America, the world's biggest single market, it has boomed in southeast Asia and Australasia, where use of amphetamine-type stimulants, many manufactured in China, has rocketed.
South America, Africa and the Caribbean have also seen serious drug problems emerging. In Europe, though the rapid rise of cocaine use has slowed, an estimated 5.3 per cent of the population used cannabis in the past year and heroin and crack use is still increasing in many regions.
Antonio da Costa, director of the UNODC, said global demand reduction measures in recent years had been "lackluster [and] uninspiring." In 2001 the office estimated that around 180 million people used drugs in the world. The number is now thought to have increased more than 10 per cent to about 3.5 per cent of the total global population.
The results will disappoint campaigners and administrators who have struggled for years against one of the world's biggest industries and will fuel fears that the "war on terror" has distracted from efforts to restrict the production and use of narcotics.
"There has been a lot of effort, but has the world suddenly said: `Ooh, we don't like drugs'? No, nor is it likely to in the near future," said Harry Shapiro, of the British charity Drugscope. A UNODC spokesmen admitted that drugs had dropped down the international agenda after 9/11 and the subsequent focus on radical Islam.
"There is not the interest these days," the spokesperson said. "People seem to have dropped the ball."
One of the biggest problems has been the explosion of amphetamine-type drugs, especially in the Far East where their use is becoming endemic.
Such drugs are now "a global phenomenon," says Koli Kouame, of the International Narcotics Control Board, another UN body. "This is a very contagious phenomenon among the youth."
The US report shows that demand for drugs has increased in more than three quarters of some 150 countries surveyed.
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