UN: World drug control efforts face huge problems
SHANGHAI — The world risks losing decades of progress in drug control if it fails to counter the emergence of a criminal market of “staggering proportions,” a U.N. official said Thursday.
“I confess I feel somewhat frustrated,” Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said following a meeting to commemorate a century of international work on curbing trafficking in opium and other drugs.
Countries should “take control of organized crime far more seriously. Otherwise the accomplishments generated over the past few decades could be undermined,” Costa said of the threat from criminal syndicates spreading their reach across almost every continent.
International efforts to curb trading in opium and other narcotics began in 1909 in Shanghai, then China’s main hub for the opium trade, with the meeting of the 13-country International Opium Commission.
The delegates meeting Thursday issued a “Shanghai declaration” lauding progress in controlling the trade in opium and its derivatives in the decades that followed that first meeting but urging stronger efforts to combat modern drug scourges. continue
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