Moscow, Dec 16 (Prensa Latina) The barons of international drug trafficking invested about three billion dollars in the past 15 years to bolster the illicit drug trade in Afghanistan, Africa and Latin America, certified today the Russian Federal Drug Control Service.
The director of the agency, Viktor Ivanov, said during a panel on the transnational organized crime in the Latin American Institute of the Academy of Sciences, that the quantity of product and related investments is comparable to Russia's Gross Domestic Product in 2014, related to the purchasing power parity, amounting to about 3.5 billion dollars.
Ivanov identified two major drug production centers in the world: the monopoly of Afghanistan in the smuggling of heroin, and South America's, related to cocaine, while the United States and Europe are the first destinations of the drug use on the planet.
The international organized crime, as stated the so-called Russian anti-drug tsar, controls the trafficking of hallucinogens to Africa, Central America and Central Asia, with huge investments and profits of one of the most lucrative businesses, next to the arms sales, smuggling of endangered species, and human trafficking.
Ivanov warned on the occasion of the presentation of the collective monograph "Transnational organized crime and the state of confrontation in Latin America", that the production of cocaine in the region grew 100 times in half a century, from 10 tons in the decade of 1950 up to a 1,030 in 2006.
As for Russia, the head of the Federal Drug Control Service said that the supplies of drugs to his country rose 15-30 percent per year. 1,2 tons of cocaine were confiscated in 2014 alone.
The volume of confiscated synthetic drugs (known here as smoking mixtures) increased by 200 times during the last decade, said Ivanov.
According to the official, these drugs cause adverse effects on the psyche of the consumers, which can lead to death (as attested by statistics) and committing serious crimes such as murder, under the influence of dangerous hallucinogens.