By NNN-Bernama
Dushanbe : United Nations Deputy Secretary General Antonio Mario Costa believes that troops of the international coalition dislocated in Afghanistan don’t participate actively enough in operations to destroy opium plantations there, Itar-Tass reported.
According to Costa, he urged the NATO Council to fight more effectively with cultivation and production of drugs in Afghanistan. As Costa said in a talk with journalists on Friday, of course, it’s better to prevent production and spreading of drugs directly in a country-producer, however, at the present moment, the government of Afghanistan is unable to solve this problem on its own.
The UN Deputy Secretary General took part in an action to destroy almost a tonne of heroin in special stoves of the Dushanbe machine-building plant.
As head of the public relations centre of the Tajik National Drug Control Agency Avaz Yuldashev said, “today the drugs, which served as material evidence at finished trials over Afghan and Tajik smugglers, were destroyed.”
Yuldashev described the drug trafficking situation as very complex, pointing to the fact that in the current year, a record-high harvest of opium was raised in Afghanistan, which will make it possible to produce more than 600 tonnes of heroin from it.
As of the beginning of the year, a total of some four tonnes of drugs, including two-thirds of heroin, have been detained by all law enforcement and border structures of Tajikistan.
Antonio Mario Costa will take part in the CIS and CSTO summits that will focus on issues of combating a drug threat.