EAST EUROPE DRUG FLOW WORRIES BRITAIN

BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Britain's anti-drugs tsar warned on Thursday that
central European countries in line for European Union membership are major
transit routes to western Europe for heroin and other illegal drugs.

``We are very concerned with the countries which will be the side door of
Europe in the near future,'' Keith Hellawell, who heads anti-drug efforts
in Britain and reports to Prime Minister Tony Blair, said.

``In the past year we've had more heroin coming up through the Balkan route
than we can stop,'' Hellawell told a news conference in Budapest, the
Hungarian capital.

He said Britain had received better cooperation from South American
countries in curbing cocaine smuggling than from Balkan countries in
controlling the flow of narcotics. Hellawell, who was speaking after two
days talks with Hungarian officials on reducing the drugs flow to western
Europe, was due to head shortly to Serbia and Albania.

He said several EU membership candidate countries in central and east
Europe, particularly Hungary and Poland, were well-known routes for drug
runners.

Vast amounts of heroin from Afghanistan (news - web sites) are trucked
through Pakistan, Turkey and Bulgaria to the Balkan countries. A large
portion makes its way through Hungary, and drugs are also shipped via
Ukraine and former Soviet republics through Poland, Hellawell said.

``We have to improve and develop capacities within each of these countries
for better coordination,'' he said.

He warned that cocaine trafficking was on the rise in central Europe,
though it was not yet at the level of heroin. ``We could have bad cocaine
issues in this region in the next 10 years,'' Hellawell said.

EU candidate countries must meet strict drug-related terms before entry,
showing that they have the specific controls and infrastructure to curb
their inflows of heroin and cocaine by 2008, he noted.