Heroin addiction slams Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan — The scene beneath a crumbling overpass in this capital city was a vision from hell. Hundreds of figures huddled together in the shadows, crouching amid garbage and fetid pools of water. Some injected heroin into each other’s limbs or groins in full view; others hid under filthy shawls to cook and inhale it.

An elderly man in a turban wandered among the addicts, showing them a snapshot of his missing son.

“I love my son, but he is sick from drugs,” said the old man, a laborer who gave his name as Ghausuddin. He looked at the photo and began to weep. “He must be cured. All of these boys must be cured or they must be killed. They are destroying Afghanistan. A whole generation is being destroyed.”

This culvert beside the desiccated Kabul River, a notorious gathering spot for drug addicts, is at the heart of a scourge that swelled after the U.S. invasion in 2001 and has spread across Afghanistan with alarming speed in recent years. The United Nations estimates that there are now as many as 1.6 million drug users in Afghan cities — about 5.2 percent of the population –up from 940,000 in 2009. As many as 3 million more are believed to be in the countryside.

The principal causes of this epidemic, officials say, are rampant unemployment, the return of addicted workers from wartime exile in Iran or Pakistan, and bumper harvests of opium poppies. Despite years of costly international efforts to curb the traditional Afghan crop, led by the U.S. government, it is thriving more than ever. According to U.S. officials, a record 520,000 acres of land were used to grow poppies in 2013.

Afghan farmers have grown opium poppies for generations, but the vast majority was exported and relatively few Afghans consumed it. In 2000, the Taliban regime deemed poppy growing un-Islamic and banned the practice. By 2005, though, the Taliban had returned as a predatory militia, hampering eradication and crop substitution programs sponsored by the United States. Production roared back, and domestic heroin use grew with it.

“People used to assume that we cultivated poppy but only for export. Today . . . at least 5 percent of the drugs produced in Afghanistan are consumed here, and they are imported from the neighbors as well,” said Mohammed Ibrahim Azhar, the deputy minister of counter narcotics. “Our security forces are putting all their resources into fighting the insurgents, and the illegal economy is booming.”

The profits from opium and heroin are temptingly huge, and the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime reported that in 2014, Afghan poppy farmers took in about $850 million — more than twice as much as five years before. In addition, officials said, processing labs have sprung up in several border provinces, and street sales of refined powder have become a major business.

But domestic law enforcement efforts have been limited and ineffective, with only about 2,000 police nationwide assigned to anti-narcotics work. Corruption is so entrenched that a major drug trafficker, whose rare 20-year sentence was hailed as a success for the ambitious U.S. drug enforcement support program, bribed his way out of an Afghan prison recently and vanished.

Although the number of addicts has soared, there is still very little help available for those who want to quit. Officials said there are 170 drug treatment facilities around the country, most built with foreign funds, but their total capacity is only 39,000 patients, and the few residential programs release addicts to the street after 40 days with little follow-up.

Azhar said plans are underway to build new centers in Nangarhar and Helmand provinces, but that 75 percent of the addicts who inject drugs are concentrated in Kabul. He also said that preliminary results of a new survey suggest that the number of rural drug users is much higher than previously thought.