It’s 5 am in Shar-e Naw Park in central Kabul. The sun hasn’t yet begun to rise, but those who call the park home are stirring. In the dim light their presence would go unnoticed if it weren’t for the occasional flickering of flames beneath draped coats and plastic tarps. Within an hour, the park will be filled with men jogging and young boys playing cricket and soccer. For now it belongs to the heroin addicts.
The US involvement in Afghanistan over the past four decades could stand as a lesson in unintended consequences. In the ‘80s, CIA funding for Afghans fighting Soviet occupation gave rise to the radical mujahideen factions that would ultimately spawn the Taliban. Now, after a decade of US occupation and nation building, Afghanistan is on the threshold of becoming a narco-state, and is awash in heroin and homegrown addicts.
“There are a lot of people with psychological problems after 30 years of warfare. So the addiction problem was waiting for us and it is now exploding in our hands,” says Jean-Luc Lemahieu of the UNODC.
Following the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the Bush administration quickly turned its attention to Iraq. Deprioritizing the Afghan war led to strategic choices that aided the cultivation of illicit crops: With a focus on developing a centralized government and securing Kabul, the US turned policing and control of large parts of the country over to warlords, many of whom had ties to poppy farming and the trafficking of poppy’s byproduct, heroin. Some poppy-rich areas of the country would see no foreign military presence until 2005—an error that facilitated the elevation of Afghanistan to the world’s number one poppy cultivator.
That increase in cultivation has been matched by a growing share of the world’s heroin market: Over the past decade Afghanistan has gone from supplying roughly 50% of Europe’s heroin to over 90% of the world’s. Worldwide, there have been 1 million deaths related to Afghan heroin since Operation Enduring Freedom began in 2001, estimates the head of Russia’s Federal Drug Control Service, Viktor Ivanov. And at the source, a particularly intense version of that tragedy is being played out.
[Above: Exclusive Fix footage of Afghanistan, featuring interviews with UNODC country representative Jean-Luc Lemahieu and Kabul heroin addict Fazel Ahmed.]
“In 2002 we established a 10-bed facility in Kabul, and we had difficulty finding one drug user on the street,” says Dr. Turiq Suliman, director of the Nejat Drug and Rehabilitation Center—one of only a handful of such facilities in Kabul. “But by 2003 there were around 50,000 to 55,000 [addicts], especially returning from Iran and Pakistan, here in Kabul City.”
[Above: Recovering heroin addicts at the Nejat Drug Rehabilitation Center’s residential treatment facility in Kabul. The center also offers outpatient night shelter and vocational training.]
During the Soviet conflict and subsequent civil war, millions of Afghans fled to refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran to escape the violence and find employment. Many developed addictions to heroin and opium while abroad, addictions they brought home after the US invasion.
But the precipitous rise in drug users following the US invasion can be attributed to a number of reasons besides the return of refugees. “There are a lot of people with psychological problems after 30 years of warfare. So the addiction problem was waiting for us and it is now exploding in our hands,” says Jean-Luc Lemahieu, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) country representative for Afghanistan.
The addiction problem is also being driven by what Lemahieu terms the Coca-Cola affect: “The supply, creating demand.” The increase in supply of heroin led to a dramatic drop in the domestic price. In Kabul, you can now buy three grams of pure heroin for $5 US. According to the UNODC, there are now over 1 million drug addicts in Afghanistan—roughly 8% of the adult population.
“It is an enormous social problem,” says Lemahieu. “An enormous health problem. It might even introduce HIV/AIDS now into this country, as if we don’t have problems enough.”
With the departure of US and NATO forces looming, the importance of illicit crops to the Afghan economy will only grow. Western officials are quick to link illicit crops with the resurgent Taliban, but often fail to note that the Taliban’s take from illicit crops and trafficking is less than 25% of the total profits.
[Above: A farmer scrapes opium latex from a poppy plant in Nangarhar province. Bulbs are scored with a sharp instrument and left for a period, allowing the latex inside to seep out. After being scraped off, the latex is used to make heroin.]
Currently, foreign funds from US and NATO occupation account for 53% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product; illicit crops account for 26%. With the withdrawal of foreign troops, the amount of cash flowing into the country will dwindle, so illicit crops will become a larger—if not the largest—portion of GDP.
Those hoping that eradication efforts, currently under the control of Afghan forces, will stem the tide of cultivation and trafficking are likely to be disappointed: In 2012 “9,762 hectares of verified poppy eradication was carried out,” according to the UNODC Afghanistan Opium Survey 2012—up 154% from 2011. Yet this still represented only 6% of the 154,000 hectares cultivated.
[Above: A police officer eradicates poppy in the village of Bandar in Nangarhar province.]
Thomas Schweich, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, and Coordinator of Counternarcotics and Justice Reform in Afghanistan from 2007 to 2008, wrote in the New York Times in 2008: “While it is true that [President] Karzai’s Taliban enemies finance themselves from the drug trade, so do many of his supporters…[and] the trouble is that the fighting is unlikely to end as long as the Taliban can finance themselves through drugs—and as long as the Kabul government is dependent on opium to sustain its own hold on power.” Little has changed in the ensuing years.
Currently, only 1% of Afghanistan’s addicts have access to treatment, a problem exacerbated by what Dr. Suliman calls “the revolving door” of care.
Back in Shar-e Naw Park it is 7 am. Fazel Ahmed sits against a tree. Though only 20, he appears older, which is attributable to his addiction and the harsh living conditions he has endured. It’s two hours since he smoked his morning dose of heroin, and his lethargy is beginning to abate.
“It has been seven years since I started using,” he says. “My father was killed by a rocket while helping our neighbor work on his house.” The rocket, he explains, was fired by the Northern Alliance during the country’s civil war, prior to the US invasion. With their father dead and violence paralyzing the country, Fazel and his older brothers fled to Iran, where they hoped to find work to support their family.
“While in Iran,” he says, “I received a message that my mother had died. My friends were smoking heroin and one asked why I was so sad. Then he asked me to come and smoke heroin with them this one time. I smoked that one time and that is when my problems started.”
Currently, only 1% of Afghanistan’s addicts have access to treatment, a problem exacerbated by what Dr. Suliman calls “the revolving door” of care (a problem not unfamiliar to addicts in the US). “We need long-term support,” he says, pointing to the transient nature of treatment facilities opened by foreign NGOs that “closed their doors” after six months: “Maybe they lost funding, or did not get the results they needed from their activity.”
The revolving door problem applies to addicts as well. While the percentage of those who undergo treatment and then relapse is not known, staying clean is made more difficult in a country with few jobs and a significant social stigma attached to addiction.
“We need to understand that we have a shared responsibility,” Lemahieu says. “We are here as one in this fight. As a Russian drug fighter said, ‘We are all being burned by the same flame, and the pain is felt by everybody.’”
Dr. Suliman concurs that the solution lies largely in the help of the international community, who are needed to work with the Afghan government “to try and establish a strategy and policy for the problem.” But this need is unlikely to be met by countries weary of the Afghan conflict and suffering from donor fatigue.
Fazel, one addict among a million, stops leaning against the tree and begins to walk, unsteady on his feet, but needing to cover the three miles to the place where he can buy this evening’s fix. He will panhandle along the way and hope to make enough extra to eat.
[Above: Heroin addict Fazel Ahmed in Kabul]
Shaun McCanna is a documentary filmmaker and writer who has worked extensively in Afghanistan since 2006. His print and documentary pieces have appeared on, and in, RT, PBS, Salon, The Christian Science Monitor and others.
Funding for the interview with Jean-Luc Lemahieu was provided by the Canadian Centre for Investigative Reporting and it is used here courtesy of CCIR.
