Russia gives US Afghan drugs data, criticizes NATO

Russia's top drugs official gave a list of Afghan and Central Asian drug barons to U.S. anti-drugs tsar Gil Kerlikowske Sunday, but criticized U.S.-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. "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," Russia's drug enforcement chief Viktor Ivanov told a news conference. Moscow is willing to prosecute the suspects. Ivanov said he 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 -- their fourth meeting in less than a year.