This would also speed up the process of solving a number of drug problems by cutting the time for scientific research and decreasing inevitable material costs.

Functions of the Head Branch of the Anti-narcotics Agency:

Changes in the given situation call for an appropriate effective response, a revision of the content and volume of work, correction of functions carried out at the departmental level.

Particularly responsible is the role of the head branch of the agency integrated in the Ministry of Internal Affairs which studies, analyzes, sums up and monitors information on narcotics in the country, informs appropriate institutions and departments about it, sets priorities in actions against narcotics, adopts measures to attain them, and carries out other managerial functions. This agency also arranges and takes part in concrete anti-narcotics campaigns. These include measures to prevent the illegal growth of drug-bearing crops (plan, organize, and carry out POPPY operations, etc.); to curb theft of drugs and highly effective medicinal substances; discover underground laboratories (develop, plan and carry out Doping operations); uncover the most sophisticated crimes (by taking direct part in investigative and search actions upon arrival on site, providing methodological, informational and technical aid); expose persons and criminal gangs with inter-regional and international narco-business links; join other services in carrying out preventive operations at airports, railway stations, customs offices to detain criminals, check the baggage, eliminate drug trafficking channels; upgrade work toward preventing and exposing drug-related crimes.

The volume of applicable law measures at this level bears a selective nature, being many inferiors to the volume of managerial and other functions. It would be more rational and effective however to rid these branches completely of any forms of direct involvement in preventing, exposing, and curbing crimes and thereby extend managerial functions by raising demands for professional leadership and service management by augmenting the staff functions of these branches and limiting their role in exposing and curbing crimes to appropriate qualified essential methods and effective control.

Perfecting Internal Affairs Ministry Work:

To make law-enforcement agencies anti-drug trafficking activity more efficient, the Internal Affairs Ministry could:

- draft comprehensive anti-drug addiction programs;

- perfect the departmental normative basis, create methods and analysis teaching aids and video-films;

- participate in the work to bring republican anti-narcotics legislation in line with the international acts;

- create a normative-legal basis to ensure a mechanism for bilateral and multilateral international cooperation;

- work out, create, and introduce in day-to-day activity a mechanism of control over the emerging narcotic situation and coordinate reaction to its changes;

- adopt measures to provide the branches with appropriate equipment and special devices;

- create automated information-search systems with wide-ranging possibilities to combat criminal narco-business;

- set out short and long term guidelines;

- determine resources for the target-oriented organizational, informative, promptly investigative and material-technical support of areas with widespread drug abuse and rampant crime;

- control the formation of local branches and their activities;

- organize interaction between law-enforcement (police) agencies, serving at areas where drugs are grown, trafficked, and consumed;

- coordinate various branches' activity to carry out joint measures toward exposing criminal gangs with inter-regional contacts and carrying out prophylactic measures on air, sea, river, and auto transport;

- form computer data banks on drug trafficking at republican and international levels;

- follow the USA and other countries' experience in setting up special mobile units, armed with the most advanced military hardware and teach methods and ecologically safe technologies of drug crops' destruction;

- promote law-enforcement (police) agencies' cooperation with customs, national security agencies, army and border troops;

- educate territorial agencies on various methods of work;

- plan cooperation with foreign agencies in preventing drugs and raw material for narcotics from being smuggled in from other regions practicing a specific form of controllable supplies envisaged by the 1988 UN Convention and exert control over such cooperation;

- organize and control scientific research and apply it;

- to study, sum up, and apply positive foreign experience;

One should bear in mind that the campaign against narcotics is part of the universal action against organized crime. Efficiency at the local level makes it possible to expose not only drug-related crimes but also felonies, especially those involving violence and theft.

If all these organizational measures are put into practice, the campaign against narcotics in the Russian Federation will be more effective.

Conclusion

The international community sees narcotics as one of the most dangerous social evils. International legal acts, as well as national legislations, including that of the Russian Federation, contain numerous norms regulating actions against narcotics bound to suppress and prevent it. Moves are made to perfect and update these norms so that they could counteract new forms and methods of committing drug-related crimes. Naturally enough, legal regulations trail after criminal thought in these and other criminal offenses.

To narrow the gap between the rapid advancement of criminal know-how and the introduction of the new anti-crime legislation there is a need to monitor the spread of narcotics, assess it, watch its dynamics, forecast its progress and carry out appropriate research. Monitoring and research are to help pinpoint the sensitive spots of drug abuse and work out new legal norms and methods for dealing with them.

Highly important are the application of legal norms and the planning of various measures aiming to oppose narcotics.

Private business has been made legal in the new social and economic conditions. Under the guise of legally established private enterprises underground drug manufacturing laboratories and drug trade hideouts (houses, apartments) have begun functioning as unofficial operational reports confirm. Illegal efforts to produce and sell drugs and the tendency for their proliferation demand emergency antidrug legislation. Illegally-operating drug-producing and drug-selling companies present a much bigger threat to society than all other drug-related ventures do, now that they (a) spread new varieties of and increasingly more hazardous drugs, (b) increase, drug production and sales manifold, (c) promote an organized system of narcobusiness and, consequently, the takeover of drug-trafficking by organized criminal groups, (d) take monopoly control of drug-trafficking and reap super-profits in this field, (e) take drug-trafficking operations beyond the national borders and make use of their foreign connections for the acquisition, manufacture, transportation, sending, smuggling and sale of drugs. Their activities prompt many related crimes.