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.