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Viktor Ivanov, head of the Russian Federal Drug Control Service:
First of all I would like to mention that from May 26-27 a meeting of the G8
will take place in the French town of Deauville,
which will for the first time in history be dedicated to the problem of so-called global drug trafficking.
The main focus of the French side, which is chairing the G8 this year, is on global *** trafficking.
At the same time there will be discussions
on new routes of drug trafficking from Latin America over the Atlantic and via African countries to Europe.
On the one hand, the formulation of the question implies a serious study of this problem
and development of counter-measures.
On the other hand, this allows us to raise a question about the subject which interests us
about the second global drug-trafficking route of Afghani heroine from Afghanistan to Europe.
At the insistence of Russia and other countries,
the agenda of the G8 meeting was extended and Afghan ***-trafficking has been also included on the agenda.
I would like to note that in the past few years Russia
has become the leading country in anti-drug diplomacy.
Our initiatives are very well known and largely discussed.
It is demonstrated by the activities of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
the Federal Drug Control Service and the State Anti-Drug Committee,
which are due to initiatives of our president, Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev,
who has called for the creation of an international anti-drug coalition
and supported the Russian plan for liquidation of the Afghan drug production, Raduga-2.
The main objective of Russia is to break down the network of global drug criminality.
Right now Russia is promoting a concrete project for the elimination of Afghan drug production
and I would like to mention that it fully corresponds with initiatives of the European Union,
which has accepted a new strategy concerning the Afghan drug-trafficking route in December 2010,
having highlighted there the problem of Afghan drug trafficking.
I invite you to pay attention to the two trans-national global drug-trafficking routes:
*** trafficking from Latin America a problem which will be discussed at the G8 meeting
at the initiative of France, which is directed towards the US,
Africa and Europe and the trafficking of Afghani ***,
which is directed mostly towards Russia and the EU.
I would like to attract your attention to very obvious facts demonstrated on this slide:
the emerging of three layers in the organizational structure of the global drug trafficking.
As ordinary citizens we usually face the first level a dispersal distribution of drugs in our countries
by means of criminal groups and networks.
Above them is situated the regional or even inter-regional level of drug networking,
which covers not only the territories of one state but also the neighbouring states.
Above both of them there is the global *** trafficking.
Here we see another pyramid, but upside down.
It demonstrates the structure of criminal revenues distribution of the global trafficking.
Here we are talking first of all about the Afghan trafficking.
It invests in global criminality about $ 65 billion annually.
We can see that it brings about $10 billion at a local level;
a bigger sum at regional level and the biggest at global level.
This slide, as you can see, represents the structure of global drug-trafficking.
We see that the transportation of drugs covers several continents.
In this case, the drug collider is transatlantic and passes the African continent.
The ***-trafficking route goes through Central Asian countries and nourishes chaos and organized crime,
as well as promoting terrorist methods in power pursuits.
This slide shows the impact of this global problem on the crisis of 2009.
According to the former Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Costa,
the global drug criminal groups have invested $352 billion in world banks.
In the end of 2010 I was in Tehran at a meeting with our Iranian colleagues and signed an agreement.
The document provides for mutual cooperation in the exchange of operational information.
We have already transferred a number of assets to the Iranian side for study,
while Iran informs us about the assets involved in drug supplies in the direction of Russia.
We would like to receive a more effective output on joint drug trafficking
as the most effective means of eliminating drug trafficking.
Nowadays we have very good cooperation with Azerbaijan,
a state which has a direct border with Iran.
It the past year we confiscated more than 1.5 tons of hashish just by cooperating with the Azerbaijani side.
We confiscated it in St. Petersburg, Makhachkala, in Siberian towns, in the Urals
and only thanks to cooperation with our Azerbaijani colleagues.
We would like to have more close and effective cooperation with Iran.