BRUSSELS, Nov 20 (AFP) - Cannabis has been widely sampled by Western Europeans, and in some countries as many as a quarter of the adult population has puffed on a joint, a European Union agency reported Tuesday.
In Finland, about 10 percent of people aged 15 to 64 have experimented with cannabis, while the rate reaches to "about 20 to 25 percent" in Britain, Denmark, France, Ireland and the Netherlands, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) said.
Countries where cannabis use was relatively rare at the start of the 1990s -- Greece, Finland and Sweden -- are now quickly catching up on others where the drug is common, it said.
The annual report by the Lisbon-based agency aims to give policy-makers a reliable EU-wide picture on drug use.
It comes a third of the way through a five-year EU "action plan" aimed at clamping down on drug trafficking and money laundering, reducing drug use among teenagers, identifying patterns of drug use and health problems, and improving treatment regimes.
The report made these points:
- USER PROFILE: The typical EU drug user is a young, adult male city-dweller.
There are also hot-spots of cannabis smoking among 15- to 16-year-old school students. In France and Britain, more than one in three in this age group smoke the drug.
However, use of amphetamines, cocaine, heroin and ecstasy are much less common than cannabis, in this age group as in others.
The report notes a big fall in use of "hard" drugs among school students in Britain and Ireland. There, the rates of youngsters who had tried the substances fell from 22 to 12 percent and from 16 to nine percent respectively.
"The substantial decrease... may imply that in advanced stages of drug diffusion, the pool of 15- to 16-year-olds willing to experiment with illegal drugs is becoming saturated," it says optimistically.
- HEALTH PROBLEMS: Britain, Italy, Luxembourg and Portugal are the black spots, with the most long-term intravenous injectors of heroin, cocaine or amphetamines.
They have a rate of between five and eight injectors per 1,000 inhabitants aged 15-64, compared with just two or three per thousand in Germany and the Netherlands.
The EU's death toll from drugs has remained stable, at between 7,000 and 8,000 cases per annum over the past five years while in some countries they have even decreased, possibly thanks to treatment programmes. Heroin is responsible for the largest number of deaths.
Hepatitis C is rampant among drug injectors, with infection rates ranging from 40 to 90 percent, and figures point to an increase in HIV transmission in this group.
- POLICING: The 2001 report identifies Central and Eastern Europe as a continued "transit region" for cannabis destined for the EU.
Other vulnerable points are Puglia, the "heel" of Italy, where drug consignments are landed from across the Adriatic, and Spain, where cannabis resin arrives across the Strait of Gibraltar and cocaine is brought in from Latin America.
Drug arrests have soared over the past 15 years, with increases by over sevenfold in Finland, Greece and Portugal.
Cannabis remains the most common drug involved in arrests, counting for 45 percent of the drug-related arrests in Italy and up to 85 percent in France.
Massive seizures of drugs have been made, the report says, noting that in 1999 alone, more than seven tonnes of heroin were seized across the EU.
Despite such successes, the prices of all major drugs have remained stable.
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