MOSCOW. Oct 21 (Interfax) - The Afghan drug crop has doubled in the zone of NATO's military operation, said chief of the Federal Drug Control Service Viktor Ivanov.
"Afghanistan has gathered two times more opium in 2011 than last year. Therefore, the heroin pressure on Central Asia and Russia will double, too," Ivanov told the government commission for anti-drug programs in Central Asia.
"This provides vivid proof that a new heroin tsunami has formed in the zone of the military operation of the security assistance force in Afghanistan under NATO's command, which is about to come down and cover the post-Soviet space and the European Union," he said.
The leading donor states for Central Asian anti-drug programs, which keep their military contingents in Afghanistan, concentrate the main resource far from poppy plantations, north of Afghanistan in Middle Asia.
"These international efforts have not brought any serious positive results either to Russia, or Central Asian states over the past ten years, and drugs keep flowing," Ivanov said.
He also announced that under the U.S. administration's new initiative for Central Asia, more than $100 million will be made available to involve the U.S. Department of Defense in coordinating anti-drug programs in Middle Asia.
"Since the Western donor programs were launched, the seizures of heroin in the transit countries have not increased, but even shrunk by some parameters," he said.