ABSTRACT
During the last two decades, the world has witnessed the ‘globalization’ of the drug abuse problem and the situation has worsened drastically. The Commission on Narcotic Drugs no longer discusses individual situations such as the smuggling of heroin into China, the illicit traffic in opium from Turkey to Egypt or the supply of heroin to New York through the ‘French Connection’. Some decades ago, the abuse problem was the concern of only a limited number of countries, but today countries that are not suffering from the harmful consequences of drug abuse are the exception rather than the rule.
