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Drug use rising worldwide
29/06/2005 10:09 - (SA)
Vienna - Illegal drugs are used by about 200 million people worldwide and represent a retail market of about $320bn, making narcotics use a "monster" of a problem to combat, the United Nations said on Wednesday in its 2005 World Drug Report.
"This is not a small enemy against which we struggle. It is a monster," Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said in the annual report.
The $320bn retail market is "larger than the individual gross domestic products (GDPs) of nearly 90% of the countries of the world," Costa said, adding that there were "few dimensions of human security that are not affected in some way by the illicit drug market."
The number of drug addicts rose by 8% in one year, owing mainly to the rising popularity of cannabis, the report said.
Cannabis is the most widely produced, trafficked and consumed narcotic worldwide with about 160 million users in 2003, up by 10 million from the previous year.
Production of the drug rose sharply from 2002 to 2003, to 40 000 tonnes, and "all indicators... suggest that the market at the global level is expanding further".
Five percent of the world's population, or 200 million people, aged 15 to 64 have used narcotics at least once in the past 12 months. That figure is 15 million higher than last year's estimate, the report said.
Statistical analysis suggests that overall drug consumption continues to spread at the global level.
Amphetamine-type stimulants, including ecstasy, were used by 34 million people in 2003, down from 38 million the previous year, a drop attributed to the dismantling of a number of large laboratories in Thailand in 2002 and a decline in the use of ecstasy in the United States.
However, opiate and cocaine use rose slightly to 16 million and 14 million people respectively.
The biggest problem worldwide from a health perspective continues to be opiates (opium, heroin and morphine), followed by cocaine. For most of Europe and Asia, opiates account for 62%of all treatment demands in 2003.
In South America, drug treatment demand is mainly linked to cocaine abuse, representing 59%. In Africa, most treatments are related to cannabis use.
Meanwhile, world production of opium rose slightly in 2004 to 4 850 tonnes, despite a drop in Laos and Myanmar.
The rise was mainly due to an increase in production in Afghanistan, which accounts for 87% of the world market three years after the fall of the Taliban regime, which had almost wiped out production.
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