Enjoy Rendering!: Сборник текстов для перевода и реферирования. Батурина С.А. - 13 стр.

                           Deadly Traffic                                  region. As much as 80 tonnes of heroin may have passed through the
                                                                           country. The value of heroin transiting has gone up by three to four
                                                                           times in 2002, reflecting an improvement in purity. In 2001 the quality
                                                                           of heroin was so poor that unhappy Russian buyers returned some to
                                                                           Afghanistan. Less opium, on the other hand, seems to have been ex-
                                                                           ported since 2000; it is increasingly being processed into heroin inside
                                                                           Afghanistan before being shipped out. As traffickers handle increas-
                                                                           ingly valuable loads, they are hedging their bets by organising more,
                                                                           but smaller, shipments. Operations are also becoming more sophisti-
                                                                           cated, and traffickers better organised and better armed. But so are Ta-
                                                                           jikistan’s authorities, in spite of persistent suspicions of corruption and
                                                                           high-level involvement the drug trade. Border guards now have test
                                                                           kits, sophisticated communication equipment and four-wheel-drive
                                                                           cars, nowhere evident a few years ago. A drug-control agency reports
      Dushanbe                                                             directly to Tajikistan’s president. Last year the leadership of the
      Opium and heroin plague the region                                   boarder guards was changed. And the fight against the growing drug
                                                                           plague is one of the few things on which Central Asian countries have
       Ictoria was 18 when she started injecting heroin. Now 22, she       brought themselves to co-operate.
claims to have been clean for the past six months. She works as a vol-            Since most local traffickers are paid in kind, the heroin trade
unteer for RAN, an NGO based in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan,       leaves a trail of ad-dicts in the transit countries of Central Asia. Ac-
which provides counselling – and clean syringes – to some of the city's    cording to the UN, heroin addic-tion in Central Asia has been the fast-
growing number of drug-takers. With neighbouring Afghanistan once          est-growing in the world since the late 1990s, and the region now has
again a major grower of opium, and demand for heroin still strong on       more than 300 000 opiate-takers, including children as young as ten.
the streets of Europe, Tajikistan and its neighbours are getting caught           According to RAN, $5-8 will buy you a gram of heroin on the
in the middle.                                                             streets of Dushanbe today, and with purer heroin now available the
       Central Asia has become a major route for Afghan opium and          number of overdoses has shot up. Although reliable statistics are hard
heroin travelling to Europe. As Pakistan and Iran have cracked down        to come by, Murtazokul Khidirov, RAN'S director, compares the
on drug trafficking from Afghanistan, the flow has moved north. Ac-        spread of HIV due to dirty needles to an ‘uncontrollable forest fire’. So
cording to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the trade of      the NGO supplies up to 3 000 clean syringes a day to 1 000 or so peo-
opium through Central Asia started to develop in the early 1990s, and      ple in Dushanbe, a drop in the ever-deeper ocean of the city’s estimated
heroin first appeared in 1995. Today the UN estimates that about one       20 000 heroin junkies, each of whom would needs about five needles a
kilo in four of heroin coming out of Afghanistan goes through Central      day.
Asia. In 2002, drug-trafficking of Afghan opiates generated $2.2 billion          Unfortunately, little help is available for those who want to es-
in Central Asia-equivalent to 7 % of the area's GDP.                       cape drugs. Victoria went in and out of rehab three times. She was
       With 1 400 km (875 miles) of porous borders with Afghanistan,       locked up and offered sleeping pills as the sole treatment, RAN can
Tajikistan is affected far more than any other Central Asian country. In   offer little more than counselling and moral support to those who want
1996, the country's authorities seized 6,5 kg of heroin. Last year, they   to break their habit. Drug-takers are regarded as criminals, and even
intercepted close to four tonnes, almost 80 % of the total seized in-the
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