The conferees summed up service achievements, and discussed what was to be done to improve detection.
Grave crimes accounted for more than 70 per cent of the entire number successfully detected. The service tracked down 74 underground chemical laboratories and 1,300 other drug-manufacturing places. More than 3,600 traffickers have been convicted.
The FSN police started work after July 1, 2003, when Russia established a State Committee for Narcotic Substance Circulation Control.
A major part of drugs-78 per cent-are smuggled into Russia in cars. 657 kilograms has been confiscated on detected instances. Railway smugglers account for a mere 20 per cent of the entire amount. Traffickers occasionally travel by air or boat, too.
Russia has a lucrative geography, promising political developments, a ramified transport network, and an extremely long frontier, which makes detection hard. All that is attracting organised crime to the country. Transnational gangs, with their profound secrecy and contacts established the world over, recur to smuggling as principal way to get drugs into the Russian black market, what with ever more passengers and freights crossing the frontier, says the statement.
The conference gathered territorial anti-drug chiefs, and spokesmen of many involved federal agencies-among them, the Prosecutor General's office, the Interior Ministry, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the Customs Service, and the Transport Ministry.
"We have every chance to block established drug-smuggling routes, on the public transport as elsewhere," Victor Cherkesov, FSN Director, said to the conferees.
