MOSCOW, March 11. /TASS/. More than 7 million people in Russia use drugs, head of the drug control authority, FSKN, Viktor Ivanov said in an interview with TASS on Friday.
In order to follow up the situation, the country should have rehabilitation programs, he said.
"Our estimation is — last year in Russia were 7.3 million people with different stages of using drugs, and only 600,000 were registered with drug treatment clinics, where only one in two was registered as a patient suffering from drug addiction, who had addressed for medical assistance, and another 300,000 are those who had addressed for medical assistance from harmful consequences of using drugs," he said.
This sphere requires strict order to realize how many people are using drugs, since those are people who do not hurry to announce themselves.
"Due to a lack of financing from the government, we cannot administer non-governmental organizations, which have been working with drug addicts using their own regulations," head of the drug control authority said. "FSKN has requested about 900 million rubles for all the regions in subsidies for rehabilitation of the drug addicts, but we have not received the financing yet."
Russian drug police confiscates more than 500 kilograms of heroin since January
Russian drug police have confiscated more than 500 kilograms of heroin since beginning of the year, Viktor Ivanov went on to say.
"Over first months of this year, we have been confiscating bigger amounts of all kinds of drugs: both heroin, and hashish, and marihuana, and synthetic substances," he said. "As of today,we have confiscated more than half a ton of heroin — by 15% more year-on-year, more than 800kilograms of synthetic drugs - here the growth is by 6%, 212 kilograms of hashish — by 10% more."