Heroin addiction spreads with alarming speed across Afghanistan - Washingtonpost

KABUL — 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. A young man lay unconscious on a muddy blanket after a long, cold night, while others speculated whether he was already dead.

“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. 

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 in Kabul and several provincial capitals.  Read More  at  Heroin addiction