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Oliver Bullough
MOSCOW, Nov 8 (Reuters) - The sharp post-Soviet rise in the number of illegal drug users in Russia has ended, the head of the drugs agency said on Tuesday, crediting a new policy of targeting big traffickers for the success. But Federal Drugs Service head Viktor Cherkesov told reporters Russia still faced huge challenges, especially from a rise in heroin smuggling through Central Asia caused by the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Afghan-Tajik border. "As for the problem of drugs in Russia, we can responsibly announce that in the last one to one and-a-half years, the rise in the number of drug users has stopped," he said. "And we have saved millions of people that would have taken the poison that we seized." Illegal drug use was minimal in Soviet times but took off with the collapse of law and order in 1991. The drugs agency was only founded in 2003, but Cherkesov reports directly President Vladimir Putin and has divisions in all Russian regions. Even with drugs use stabilising, Russia still faces a major problem. According to Interior Ministry figures, 4 million Russian teenagers use drugs -- a quarter of them as addicts -- along with millions more adults. Cherkesov said reducing narcotics dependency would require a giant coordinated effort from all Russian state bodies, but that his agency had managed to take a serious chunk out of the illegal drugs market. "In 2000, 2001 or 2002 we were seizing less than a tonne of heroin a year,then last year we seized 3.9 tonnes of heroin. And this year we have already seized more than four tonnes of heroin," he said. "This is not proof of a rise in the volume of heroin on our market, we are hunting for it in a different way. We are fighting those criminal groups that control the market. Russia has launched joint anti-drug operations with neighbouring ex-Soviet states, in an attempt to disrupt the so-called "northern route" which carries heroin from top producer Afghanistan through Central Asia to Russia and Europe. But Cherkesov said his agency was struggling to control an increased flow of heroin into its southern regions since June when Russian border guards left the Tajik-Afghan border, which they had guarded since the end of Soviet rule. "Our border guards left now we are seeing more big batches of drugs... batches of hundreds of kg, which are very big," he said. "And you cannot say drugs production in Afghanistan is falling."
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