LAHORE: Punjab has the high­est num­ber of peo­ple who use drugs, with 2.9 mil­lion peo­ple us­ing il­lic­it sub­stan­ces and 260,000 in­ject­ing drugs.

Cannabis is found to be the most com­mon­ly used drug in Punjab (3.1pc). Vulnerability to HIV and oth­er blood-borne dis­ea­ses through in­ject­ing drugs is al­so con­sid­er­a­ble, re­veals the National Drug Use Survey-2013, con­duc­ted and launched by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime at a lo­cal ho­tel on Thursday. Adviser to Chief Minister on Health Khwaja Salman Rafique in­aug­u­ra­ted the launch of the re­port.

It re­veals how Pakistan’s pop­u­la­tion aged 15-64 has been fac­ing the dev­as­tat­ing con­se­quen­ces of sub­stance abuse. It es­ti­mates that six per cent (6.7 mil­lion adults in Pakistan) used drugs in the last 12 months. Although 4.25 mil­lion in­di­vid­u­als were thought to be drug de­pend­ent, treat­ment and spe­cial­ist in­ter­ven­tions were in short sup­ply and were avail­a­ble to less than 30,000 drug users a year.

Moreover, no struc­tured treat­ment was avail­a­ble to the drug users free of charge.

“In a coun­try where al­most a quar­ter of the pop­u­la­tion was es­ti­ma­ted to be liv­ing on less than US $1.25 a day, the bar­ri­ers pre­vent­ing ac­cess to struc­tured treat­ment were ex­cep­tion­al­ly high,” the re­port says.

Mr Cesar Guedes, rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the UNODC, sta­ted that the National Drug Use Survey 2013 was con­duc­ted for the first time at the pro­vin­cial lev­el in Pakistan. He said it pro­vi­ded a com­pre­hen­sive da­ta on drug use and its im­pli­ca­tions on HIV trans­mis­sion. The in­for­ma­tion pro­vi­ded in the re­port would form the base­line for fu­ture plan­ning and de­sign­ing of drug pre­ven­tion and treat­ment pro­grammes in Pakistan.

He ob­served that Afghanistan had be­come one of the larg­est pop­py cul­ti­vat­ing coun­try in the world. He stressed the need for ef­fec­tive meas­ures to con­trol smug­gling of nar­cot­ics and to stop the use of drugs not on­ly in Pakistan but al­so to check the traf­fick­ing of nar­cot­ics to oth­er coun­tries from this route.

Mr Cesar said the re­port was the re­sult of a col­lab­o­ra­tive re­search ef­fort be­tween the Narcotics Control Division, the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, and the UNODC. It aimed to pro­vide base­line in­for­ma­tion on the prev­a­lence and pat­terns of drug use among the pop­u­la­tion aged 15 to 64 in or­der to in­form gov­ern­ment, civ­il so­ci­ety and pri­vate-sec­tor or­gan­i­sa­tions in de­sign­ing and im­ple­ment­ing ef­fec­tive pre­ven­tion, treat­ment and care serv­ices across the coun­try.

Published in Dawn, May 23rd, 2014