About 250 million people on Earth do drugs at least once a year, and 30 million of them are drug addicts, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Executive Director Yury Fedotov said in a lecture at the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum on May 18.
“As of today, a quarter billion people worldwide do drugs, including those who experiment with drugs once a year. Thirty million of those people belong to the risk group, as they are addicted to drugs and have related medical conditions,” Fedotov said.
Drug use has been growing proportionately to the planetary population, he said.
“One can say that the existent drug trafficking suppression system is working, but we are still unable to achieve a decline in the use of drugs,” Fedotov said.
Drugs kill up to 200,000 people a year across the globe.
Some 11.5 million people do drugs intravenously; 52 percent of them are infected with Hepatitis C and 14 percent are HIV-positive.
“These figures signify the suffering of millions of people and their kin,” the UN officer said.
“No matter what we do, we are witnessing an increase in the amount of drug crops sown in every manufacturing region. The dividing line between countries manufacturing, transiting and consuming drugs is disappearing. Dealers are turning all of them into one big drug market,” Fedotov said.
