Accord signed to kill poppy fields, find traffickers

Afghanistan, Pakistan and Tajikistan agreed with Russia on Wednesday to step up efforts in fighting the Afghan heroin trade which kills at least 30,000 Russians a year. "We are neighbours linked by the same piece of land, and we have the potential to strengthen our work in fighting a global menace," Russia's anti-drugs tsar Viktor Ivanov told his Central Asian counterparts.
The quartet of heroin-inflicted countries signed an agreement to destroy opium crops and drug-making labs, as well as exchange information on drug trafficking and dealers. Russia is struggling to contain a potentially crippling heroin crisis. The world's largest per capita heroin consumer, with at least 2 million addicts, Russia is now facing an HIV/AIDS epidemic that is spreading amongst drug users from dirty needles, Western health officials say.
Heroin from Afghanistan - which produces around 90 percent of the world's total - is smuggled through its porous border with impoverished, ex-Soviet Tajikistan, then via Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan and onto the Russian market, Ivanov said.