COCAINE USE IN EUROPE IS ON THE RISE

West Africa Is Drug's New Transit Route: UN

The world's $88-billion cocaine market is shifting toward Europe and
is severely destabilizing transit countries in West Africa, even as
total production falls, a United Nations report said on Wednesday.

The shift in demand has altered trafficking routes, with more cocaine
flowing from Andean countries to Europe via Africa rather than to the
United States, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said.

"This is causing regional instability," the UNODC said in its
wide-ranging annual World Drug Report.

"People snorting coke in Europe are killing the pristine forests of
the Andean countries and corrupting governments in West Africa,"
UNODC executive director Antonio Maria Costa said.

The number of cocaine users in Europe has doubled in the last decade
and the market is now worth $34 billion, almost as much as that in
North America, the world's biggest consumer of the drug.

Europe's around four million cocaine users consumed about one quarter
of global production in 2008.

World cocaine production has fallen 12 to 18 per cent in the past
three years and the North American market is shrinking, thanks in
part to police crackdowns in producer Colombia and transit corridor Mexico.

The world's other main "problem drug," heroin, is also seeing a
decline in production and will continue to do so, the report said,
citing expected declines in crop yields.

Iran and Turkey had done well to tackle the heroin flow out of
Afghanistan, which produces most of the world's supply, but Russia,
Central Asian and Balkan countries had performed poorly, the agency said.

While the two main substances are seeing declines, overall abuse has
risen in developing countries, many of which lack the means to treat
their addicts properly, the UNODC said.

More West Africans are taking cocaine as the drug passes through
their countries on the way to the larger European market and more
people in East Africa are taking heroin.

"We will not solve the world drugs problem by shifting consumption
from the developed to the developing world," Costa said.