Opium Production on the Rise Worldwide, U.N. Reports

UNITED NATIONS — Illegal opium cultivation occupies more land worldwide than ever before, according to the United Nations, largely because of a surge over the last year in Afghanistan, the world’s dominant opium producer.

The annual World Drug Report, released Thursday, found that nearly 741,000 acres worldwide were occupied by opium-producing poppy fields, which is the largest area devoted to the farming of the contraband crop since 1998, when estimates were first available. Afghanistan’s poppy fields alone expanded by 36 percent between 2012 and 2013, taking up 516,000 acres. Myanmar, too, stepped up opium production; nearly 143,000 acres were devoted to poppy

The report, released on Thursday in Vienna, comes at a time of growing scrutiny on the global treaties that prohibit the use and trade of opium, heroin, cocaine and the coca leaf and which form the basis for the militarized war on drugs. Bolivia withdrew from the 1961 U.N. Convention on Narcotic Drugs to protest the ban on what they called an indigenous tradition of chewing coca leaves. Uruguay also last year became the first country in the world to establish a regulated legal market for marijuana.

Countries pummeled by drug violence, especially in Latin America, are increasingly debating alternatives to the war on drugs.

The U.N. report found that methamphetamine seizures doubled in the period between 2010 and 2012, in particular in the United States and Mexico. And new psychoactive substances popped up in the global market, many of them available online on what the report called the “dark net,” meaning that they were difficult to trace. Cocaine production has steadily declined for the last 6 years.

Cannabis use patterns stumped the authors of the report. Worldwide, cannabis use seems to have decreased, the report said, particularly in Europe, though more Americans are using it.

As for Afghan opium, it is increasingly reaching European markets through Pakistan and the countries of the Middle East, with increased law enforcement along the traditional Balkan route