Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu said Tuesday that Turkey broke records in the seizure of drugs last year and vowed to continue this trend in the country’s battle against drugs.
Addressing an event on the fight against narcotics crimes held in the southern province of Antalya, the minister noted that they also managed to bring down drug-related deaths.
"In 2021, we broke records in the history of the Republic of Turkey by seizing 22.2 tons of heroin, 2.8 tons of cocaine, 5.5 tons of methamphetamine and 8.4 million synthetic (drugs)," he announced.
Turkey had stepped up counternarcotics efforts five years ago when the yearly drug-related deaths reached 941. In 2021, this number dropped to around 190. Soylu said this decline would continue. He highlighted that they increased the number of counternarcotics operations reaching 217,000 last year, from 88,000 in 2016. Turkey also made the highest number of arrests in counternarcotics operations last year, with 26,788 suspects arrested. "Today, there are more than 100,000 people convicted of drug-related crimes in prisons," Soylu said.
Though drug use is not limited to them, abandoned, unused buildings across the country often serve as havens for drug use. The minister said they constituted 27% of places where people consume drugs, and the government demolished more than 74,000 out of nearly 110,000 such buildings in a bid to reduce hideouts for users.
The country lies at a crossing point between Asia and Europe, a route exploited by drug smugglers bringing "organic" drugs from Asian countries to European markets and carrying synthetic drugs produced in European drug labs to Asian countries, including Turkey.
"This is a global problem. Drug use is a serious issue. According to the United Nations’ 2019 figures, 275 million people between the ages of 15 and 64 have, at least, once consumed narcotics drugs in their life. Synthetic drugs are growing in number and diversity in the meantime," the minister warned.
Soylu also blamed the United States intervention in Afghanistan as a culprit in the record cultivation of opium and related smuggling activities. "Another danger stems from terrorist groups involved in smuggling. Daesh and the PKK are involved in the drug trade and they finance their other activities with smuggling. The PKK, for instance, runs almost the entire drug market in Europe. Our European friends give protection to fugitive PKK members wanted by the state and give them residence permits," he added.
He hailed a drop in drug smuggling activities of terrorist groups thanks to the counterterrorism operations Turkey has carried out. "We managed to cutoff the shipment of drugs from the East to the West. This is a historic success," the minister said, referring to drug cultivation and trade concentrated in the eastern provinces of Turkey, where the PKK has long been active in carrying out terrorist attacks.