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MOSCOW: Russia’s top drugs official gave a list of Afghan and Central Asian drug barons to “US anti-drugs tsar” Gil Kerlikowske on Sunday, but criticised US-led forces in Afghanistan for failing to stem opium output.

Russia is the world’s biggest per capita user of heroin-all of it flowing from Afghanistan- and President Dmitry Medvedev has called drug abuse among the country’s youth a threat to national security.

Russia’s drug enforcement chief Viktor Ivanov met Kerlikowske, director of the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, at a Moscow airport during Kerlikowske’s stopover en route to Stockholm. Ivanov told a news conference, “I handed him (Kerlikowske) over a list of nine... people living in Afghanistan or elsewhere in Central Asia and involved in drug trafficking by supplying wholesale batches of narcotics”.

He said Russia had earlier supplied the names of around 25 other people involved in drug trade along with data on 175 drug laboratories operating in Afghanistan. “To destroy these drug laboratories is the most urgent task, because these are already well-established cartels with a stable hierarchy and structure, funding sources and technological equipment to produce narcotics,” Ivanov said.

He added that Russia annually consumed 35 tonnes of heroin alone and if counted with other Afghan-made opiates, Russia’s per capita consumption of opium was the biggest in the world.