MOSCOW, December 20 (Itar-Tass) —— About 5,000,000 people take drugs in Russia, and the number of those who take synthetic and psychotropic drugs has increased considerably, Federal Drug Control Service chief Viktor Ivanov said on Tuesday.
"According to our monitoring, we have about five million drug consumers," he said. Not all of them are drug addicts, but five million people take drugs in some of other kinds, he added.
Though every year more than 100,000 are prosecuted for drug traffic, and the number of such cases in courts sometimes accounts for 50 percent, there is drug infrastructure restoration, the official noted.
It resembles lawn mowing – it is regularly trimmed, but grass grows again, he said.
It means there is ground. In this case, it is a social order for the drug infrastructure. The order is formed by a large army of drug consumers seeking narcotics, he stressed.
Ivanov said about a number of trends on the drug market in Russia. According to him, heroin traffic declined in Russia in the past four years on the average by 20 percent. Meanwhile, a part of heroin addicts switched to consumption of no less dangerous desomorphine made from codeine-containing anesthetics. Poppy straw traffic is also growing.
The increase of intercepted psychotropic and synthetic drugs is 3,800 percent. It is an unprecedented growth connected with the demand for synthetic substances, the drug control service chief noted.