Russians annually spend some $17 billion on drugs that mainly come from Afghanistan, Russia's chief sanitary doctor said on Monday.

"Afghanistan produces today more opiates than the whole world used to produce five years ago," Gennady Onishchenko said at a news conference in Moscow.

Russia is battling a rise in the flow of heroin from Afghanistan into its North Caucasus region. Afghanistan produces more than 90% of the world's opium, the main raw material for heroin and a major source of revenue for the Taliban-led insurgency in the country.

Onishchenko added that annually some 35 tons of drugs are brought to Russia from Afghanistan.

Russia's Federal Drug Control Service said in a statement last week that there are some 550,000 drug addicts officially registered in Russia, with unofficial estimates as high as 2.5 million accounting for almost 2% of Russia's 142-million population.

The drug watchdog added that almost 75,000 Russians annually try drugs for the first time, with the annual death toll reaching 30,000.

MOSCOW, March 15 (RIA Novosti)