UN IS LOSING GROUND IN DRUGS WAR

VIENNA: The United Nations is losing its global war on drugs, two reports have said.
The worldwide trade in illegal drugs has ballooned to more than $300bn a year, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said in a report as a global drug conference opened in Vienna on Wednesday.
The UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs conference was to review the decade since a UN General Assembly session (Ungass) launched its war on drugs.
The UN report said "there are many illicit drugs in the world, too many people suffering from addiction, and too much crime and violence associated with the drugs trade".
A European Commission report on Tuesday also said it had "found no evidence that the global drug problem was reduced during the Ungass period from 1998 to 2007".
"Broadly speaking the situation has improved a little in some of the richer countries while for others it worsened, and for some it worsened sharply and substantially, among them a few large developing or transitional countries," the EC report said.
"In other words, the world drugs situation seems to be more or less in the same state as in 1998," the report by the 27-nation European Union's executive body said.
The EC report said enforcing drug bans had backfired by displacing drugs traffickers to relatively lawless regions.
The ban had led to addicts sharing needles – spreading disease such as Aids - as syringe-exchange centres had been unavailable.
Courtesy: Al Jazeera