Viktor Ivanov said the international community's failure to uproot poppy plantations in Afghanistan, as envisaged by a 10-year UN plan adopted in 1998, had caused heroin to flood into Russia across Central Asia's porous borders.
"In recent years, Russia has not just become massively hooked on Afghan opiates, it has also become the world's absolute leader in the opiate trade and the No. 1 heroin consumer," he said Friday in a report.
Ivanov said 90 percent of Russian addicts now take Afghan heroin, and the drug is partly to blame for increasing crime and a fall in Russia's population.
Russia will press for a tough action plan on Afghanistan at a high-level meeting of the UN-sponsored Commission on Narcotic Drugs in Vienna on Wednesday and Thursday, he said.
"Our people are dying. Some 90 percent of drug addicts in Russia are on Afghan heroin," Ivanov said. "This is a threat to national security and to our country's society."
Health Ministry officials say Russia has up to 2.5 million drug addicts out of a population of about 140 million. Most addicts were aged 18 to 39 and lived seven years at most after starting to take heroin.
Ivanov, who did not say which country Russia had replaced as the top heroin user, estimated that the addiction cost Russia 3 percent of its annual gross domestic product, which in 2008 totaled about $1.7 trillion. He said it was impossible to control Russia's 7,000-kilometer border with Kazakhstan through which drugs arrive. Some 3.5 tons of heroin were intercepted last year, a 17.5 percent increase from 2007. But in the first two months of this year, 400 kilograms were seized, a 70 percent increase from the same period last year, he said.
"It is real luck if 20 percent [of total trafficked volumes] are intercepted," he said. "Usually, it's 10 percent."
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