I’m Sorry I Drug You into This

There is one crop that Afghan farmers just know will sell like hotcakes in the international marketplace. Opium and its derivatives (like heroin, morphine and codeine). “For the third year in a row, opium cultivation has increased across Afghanistan, erasing earlier drops stemming from a decade-long international and Afghan government effort to combat the drug trade, according to a United Nations report released [in April]…Afghanistan is already the world’s largest producer of opium, and last year accounted for 75 percent of the world’s heroin supply. ‘The assumption is it will reach again to 90 percent this year,’ said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, the United Nations’ top counternarcotics official here.

“The report, the Afghanistan Opium Risk Assessment 2013, issued by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and based on extensive surveys, found that opium cultivation had increased in 12 of the country’s 34 provinces. Herat, in western Afghanistan, is the only province in which cultivation is expected to decrease, the report said.” New York Times, April 15^th. The unfortunate new statistic, however, is that addiction rates inside Afghanistan make it one of the most addicted nations on earth.

5.3% of the people are estimated to be addicts. In urban areas, one in ten households have an addict member. In the town of Herat, that number is one in five. While the culture has looked upon opium as having medicinal value, there has been a marked shift into pure unbridled addictions, sometimes moving into new drugs, such as crystal meth, which were unknown until the NATO incursion.

But following in the footsteps of most wise Western powers – notwithstanding the reality that this technique (combined with criminal prosecution) has not lowered addiction rates anywhere – the effort in Afghanistan is on curtailing production and not on treating the addicts. “The focus of the international community and the Afghan government has instead been on reducing opium production. Since the beginning of the war in 2001, the Americans have spent more than $6 billion to curb Afghanistan’s opium industry, including eradication and alternative crop subsidies. The effort has struggled, and in many areas eradication efforts have been unofficially abandoned as too costly in terms of lost public support for government.

“In the last two years, opium cultivation has increased to the highest level since 2008, as global demand and prices remain robust… The sheer volume of supply has fueled domestic demand, a phenomenon the United Nations drug czar in Afghanistan refers to as ‘the Coca-Cola effect,’ after the company’s market-saturation tactics.

Cementing the status quo is a lack of treatment options, like methadone substitution, or a holistic plan to address the crisis… ‘This is a tsunami for our country,’ said Dr. Ahmad Fawad Osmani, the director of drug demand reduction for the Ministry of Public Health. ‘The only thing our drug production has brought us is one million drug users.’” NY Times, November 2^nd. Some villages have addiction rates of as much as 30%. HIV is following close behind. In otherwise prosperous Herat, the infection rate, according to a Johns Hopkins study, is reaching 18% among IV drug users.

Herat is touted as a city with a robust economy. But that’s not the picture on the other side of the tracks. Wasted people living in filth. Junkie ghettos filled with lost souls, treatment option bleak to non-existent. “In a country troubled by adversity, from its long-running war to rampant corruption, drug addiction ranks low among national priorities. Government funding for treatment and outreach is less than $4 million a year. There are just under 28,000 formal treatment slots available nationwide, officials say, and such programs rely heavily on roughly $12 million a year in extra international funding for treatment…

“From 2005 to 2009, the use of opiates doubled, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, putting Afghanistan on par with Russia and Iran, and the number of heroin users jumped more than 140 percent. Most drug experts think the rate of drug use has only increased since then.” NY Times. Picture soldiers on patrol, high on heroin, government ministers in one of the world’s most corrupt countries turning the other way as massive shipments of drugs move freely about the land or into the export markets. An anti-addiction mandate is one of the planks in the Taliban’s campaign to win the hearts and minds of the people. Of course their more productive technique is simply to kill those who oppose them, somewhat more convincing.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is indeed fascinating – in a really, really bad way – how much worse the world has become since we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan.