LESS OPIUM, BUT HEROIN TRADE A THREAT

TASHKENT, Uzbekistan -- Opium production in Afghanistan dropped 28 percent
this year because of widespread drought and a U.N. crop-substitution
program, the senior U.N. drug-control official said Thursday.

Afghanistan supplies an estimated 75 percent of the world's illicit opium,
and the decline was one of the few bright spots at an international
conference on drug trafficking and terrorism in Central Asia sponsored by
the U.N. Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention and the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Heroin is refined opium, and Pino Arlacchi, executive director of the U.N.
anti-drug program, said opium production fell this year in Afghanistan to
about 3,600 tons, after doubling last year, to 5,100 tons. While drought
caused most of the decline, Arlacchi said a crop-substitution program
accounted for about one-third of the drop.

Despite the decline, regional and international leaders warned that illegal
drug trafficking from Afghanistan and its rulers' links to insurgent
movements pose the major threat to the tenuous political and economic
stability of the five Central Asian nations: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. All were republics of the Soviet
Union before that country dissolved at the end of 1991.

``The threat is increasing and the major reason is the situation in
Afghanistan,'' said Erlan Idrisov, the Kazakh foreign minister. ``It is the
source of instability in the region.''

An estimated 80 percent of Europe's heroin flows through the region. The
drugs come across hundreds of miles of poorly policed borders and through
remote mountain passes so high that drug-sniffing dogs are rendered useless
by the altitude, then the drugs pass through Russia. The bulk of the
shipment is heroin, concealed in cars, buses and trucks and carried by
small groups of people on foot and horseback.

This summer, border guards in Kazakhstan, acting on a tip, stopped the car
of the ambassador from Tajikistan. They slit open the tires and discovered
a large amount of heroin in plastic bags. The ambassador was not implicated.

Col. Zhanybek Bakiev, the chief of Kyrgyzstan's new international
drug-control office, said last week that finding heroin is almost
impossible unless the police have information in advance. He illustrated
the difficulty by describing a recent incident in which border guards
scouring a suspicious passenger bus found a large quantity of heroin
concealed in the compressor for the air brakes.

Thus, in a region where most trade travels by truck and roads built in the
Soviet era lead deep into Russia, stopping drugs is a difficult task.