UNITED NATIONS: The United Nations warned nearly 90 countries including the United States and most of Europe to prepare for more deaths from heroin overdoses because of surging opium production in Afghanistan.
The 2006 Afghan Opium Survey, published by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, found production of the raw material for heroin hit a record 6,100 tonnes, almost 50 percent higher than last year. This accounted for more than 90 percent of the world’s supply.
"The abundant supply of Afghan heroin is likely to result in dramatic increases in the purity of street heroin," the executive director of the Vienna-based agency, Antonio Maria Costa, said in a statement.
"This, in turn, is likely to prompt a substantial increase in the number of deaths by overdose as addicts are not used to injecting doses containing such high concentrations of the drug," he said.
Costa said he had written to nearly 90 health ministers from countries which had a problem with heroin to warn them.
He said that past experience had shown that a sharp rise in the supply of heroin tended to increase the purity of the end-product rather than lower street prices.
Afghanistan President Harmid Karzai said last month that the country faced a 10- to 15-year fight to eradicate its surging opium production and wean poor farmers from growing the raw material for heroin.
Karzai said desperation after decades of war and poverty drove Afghan farmers to turn orchards and vineyards into fields of poppy, which now accounted for 30 percent of his country’s economy.
Much of the sharp rise in production this year had occurred in southern provinces hit by a growing Taliban insurgency against Karzai’s Western-backed government, jarring a U.S. counternarcotics program to wipe out opium in the country. | 
Health
