Known addicts in the countries of the European Common Market are now said to number 100,000, and 2,000 reportedly paid for their habit with their lives last year.

In Portugal, officials admit that drug abuse is reaching the ‘magnitude of a national calamity.’ That nation is said to have one of the highest per person narcotics consumption rates in Europe.

“We’re fighting a losing battle,” says a French drug clinic operator. “Whenever we gain an inch, something happens to throw us back a mile.”

Narcotics-related deaths reflect this sudden jump in European drug abuse. For example, such deaths in France rose from 13 in 1973 to 59 in 1976; in Germany, from 104 in 1973 to 156 during just the first half of 1976; and in Italy, from one death in 1973 to 30 in the first six months of 1976.

But Europe is not the only part of the world feeling the tightening grip of drug abuse. The Far Eastern Economic Review reports:

“Hard-drug trafficking and addiction in Southeast Asia are at an appalling level. In Hong Kong, according to a reliable estimate, about one person in forty-three is addicted to opium or heroin. In Thailand, where narcotics were traditionally thought of as a ‘European problem,’ there is a burgeoning population of heroin addicts believed to number from 300,000 to 600,000. Reports from Singapore and Malaysia are equally alarming.”​—April 30, 1976.

Despite stiff penalties, known drug addiction in Singapore multiplied eight times and arrests of drug pushers tripled from 1974 to 1975. Japanese drug arrests quadrupled between 1971 and 1975. And in the Melbourne region of Australia, there was a 60-percent increase in marijuana arrests from 1974 to 1975. “It is widely used among all levels of Australian society,” observes the Age of Melbourne.

Neither has the African continent escaped the grip of drugs. The U.N. Commission on narcotic drugs recently called the drug situation south of the Sahara “grave.”

“You can find heroin in every high school, university and youth center,” worries a West German drug counselor. “The situation is catastrophic.

“Youthful addiction is also a mounting problem in Hong Kong,” says the Far Eastern Economic Review. And an Italian official noted that, in his country, the “victims seem to be getting younger every day.”

This same government committee also stated that drugged students routinely sleep at their desks without interference from school authorities.