U.N. offers 10 year plan to eradicate heroin, cocaine

VIENNA, Austria (November 14, 1997 07:53 a.m. EST http://www.nando.net) The
U.N. drug czar is outlining a 10 year plan to drive the world's coca and
opium producers out of business, starting first with Afghan poppy growers.
Pino Arlacchi, head of the U.N. effort against drug trafficking and
organized crime, said the campaign would use a mix of economic incentives,
monitoring and enforcement.

Arlacchi estimated Thursday it would cost $25 million a year over the next
10 years to end opium production in Afghanistan.

He gave no estimate for the cost of the worldwide program.

The United States has agreed to help monitor drug producing areas, U.N.
officials said.

Arlacchi travels to Afghanistan next week to work out details of the program
with the ruling Taliban religious army, which claims to have banned
narcotics in 90 percent of the country it controls.

But the U.N. drug control program estimates that 96 percent of opium coming
from Afghanistan, second only to Burma in world production, is grown in
Taliban zones.

Earlier this month, Taliban officials said they had begun destroying heroin
labs and arresting people involved in refining the drug, made from poppies.

One of the United Nations' first steps in Afghanistan will be helping to
reopen a wool factory in the southern city of Kandahar to provide work for
1,000 people who might otherwise be forced to earn a living from growing
poppies, the raw material for opium and heroin.

"Every peasant would prefer to have a stable, safe and legal source of
income," Arlacchi claimed.

Previous international efforts have been successful at ending production of
drugs in the Asian nations of Thailand and Pakistan. But production moved to
neighboring countries, such as Burma and Afghanistan.

U.N. officials hope to prevent that by identifying areas where production
might move, and stopping it by destroying the first crops and providing jobs
or incentives to grow other crops.

The effort against the production of coca the raw material for cocaine
in Peru, Columbia and Bolivia, must also mix incentives and tough law
enforcement to be successful, Arlacchi said.

The new U.N. effort does not focus on cannabis (the raw material for
marijuana) because its production is too widespread, or on synthetic drugs
because too little is known about them, U.N. officials said.