(Agenda item 4: International Narcotics Control Board)

How the INCB Works

The Report of the International narcotics Control Board (INCB) each year contains a section providing an analysis of the world drug situation, based on information from a number of sources, including reports provided to the Board in accordance with the international drug control treaties. The treaties which assign this task to the Board are:

- The 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, as amended by the 1972 Protocol;

- The 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances; and

- The 1988 United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances.

The Board also obtains other information which are regarded as indicators of national, regional and international trends in drug abuse and illicit trafficking. The sources of that other information include reports of the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) and the World Customs Organization on illicit trafficking and drug seizures throughout the world, reports and special studies issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) on drug abuse and direct case investigations by the INCB.

The Board takes into account reports from regional and country offices and the various departments of the United Nations International Drug Control Programme (UNDCP) as well as reports in the mass media and specialized publications. Each year Board members travel to selected countries to follow up on concerns related to treaty implementation and reports of significant developments in abuse and trafficking. Over the course of the year, this information and data is analyzed and the relevant section of the annual report is drafted. At the Board's fall session, this text is discussed and approved.

Difficulties

Among the difficulties experienced by the Board in this process are that data on certain countries or issues may not be available, and that indicators are often only approximate, misleading or not comparable between countries. Part of the problem is that indicators are not universally defined. Examples of indicators considered by the INCB in assessing the world drug situation are the number of drug abusers, number of drug-related arrests, seizure data, drug-related deaths, and the types of drugs abused, cultivated, produced and trafficked in a praticular country of region. Other indicators are Governments' accession to international drug control treaties, governmental drug control structure and cooperation with international organizations and other Governments. A country's treatment and rehabilitation programmes also serve as an indicator.

ILLICIT DRUG MANUFACTURERS HIT HARD BY CHEMICAL CONTROLS

A drug control treaty adopted in 1988 requires its parties to keep close watch over the movements of some common industrial chemicals essential to the manufacture of drugs such as heroin, cocaine, "Ecstasy" and "ICE". Those controls have started to work.

The legislatin enabling local and national regulatory authorities to require various types of monitoring of the domestic and international movements of licit chemicals -- and the exchange of information at the international level -- has become the secret weapon of the global fight against drug trafficking.

Fields of poppy, coca and cannabis may defy detection and smugglers may enjoy a low rate of interdiction, but companies producing such drug-manufacturing essentials as acetic anhydride or acetone, which have many legitimate uses, must report suspiciously large of unusual domestic and international orders to Governments, which then share that information with the Board.

Last year the Board was able to identify previously unknown routes and transshipment points for diverted acetic anhydride, a chemical used in converting morphine to heroin. The Bourd found that Government actions in application of the 1988 Convention had led to the spotting of attempts to divert at least 300 metric tons of acetic anhydride -- enough to make approximately one billion street doses of heroin. That was almost ten times the amount of heroin reported seized worldwide in 1995.

Because of suspicious circumstances, authorities were also able to stop the export of almost 1,800 tonnes of chemicals used in the illicit processing of cocaine, enough to make more than 100 tonnes of the drug.

The Board reports, for example, that traffickers now divert a large part of the acetic anhydride needed for heroin manufacture in South-West Asia from or through the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, as well as from India.

Despite the significant successes scored in this area in 1996, the Board also notes that a lack of uniform action by many countries continues to benefit traffickers. Successes could have been multiplied if more Governments had established frameworks for precursor control or had taken action to verify the legitimacy of transactions involving the substances in question. The Board sees a need for greater cooperation with industry in keeping track of licit trade in and use of controlled chemicals in order to make it easier to identify suspicious shipments.