RIYADH, 31 March — Almost $4 trillion, a figure equaling hundred times the annual budget of Saudi Arabia, have been spent around the globe in treating drug addicts whose number today stands at around 400 million, three times the population of all Arab states and 20 times that of the Kingdom.
This was disclosed yesterday by Dr. Abdullah Hamad Al-Homiedan, dean of the College of Languages and Translation of King Saud University, at a weeklong anti-narcotics campaign, organized by his college.
A display warning of a variety of drugs and their lethal effects is part of the program, which consists of a series of lectures on the subject by officials of the Ministry of the Interior and Dirayya Police Department.
"This will contribute to our curricular activities, since we offer multilingual translation and interpretation programs to our students and some of the passages used for translation are related to security and crime prevention," Al-Homiedan said.
"Although opium has been known to man for almost 6,000 years, never did it pose so serious a threat to the human race as do organic derivatives today," he added.
The college was considering making this an annual event.
After inaugurating the exhibition, Brig. Gen. Othman Al-Assaf, director of Narcotics Control Division of Riyadh Region, told Arab News that the number of drug addicts in the Kingdom had been in decline in recent years."We are in contact with the drug control organizations of other countries of the region and the WHO, and this, coupled with strong vigilance at our airports and land entry points, has helped reduce the smuggling of narcotics into the country," he said.
He also pointed out that the majority of users in Saudi Arabia were in their twenties, and that the anti-narcotic campaign was therefore aimed more at the young.
