A NATION ON DRUGS

Afghanistan Struggles To Conquer Its Economy's Addiction To The Most
Lucrative Of Cash Crops

KABUL - Zmirai Mohammed got addicted to opium and heroin to dull the
pain of war injuries. Mohammed, one of the thousands in Afghanistan's
makeshift guerrilla armies, got more injuries as the war against the
Russians of the 1980s turned into civil war and then the war against
the Taliban in the 1990s, and he stayed addicted.

For the same kind of reasons, so did his homeland, Afghanistan, which
grew dependent on an opium economy in the last years of the 20th
century, when war tore apart everything else.

Now, as addiction rates skyrocket here and Afghanistan's opium
industry has come to dominate both its own economy and the world's
heroin supply, Mohammed, his country, and those around them are
straining to find ways for Afghans to live without drugs.

There's no easy solution for either group.

Vancouver and B.C. have seen first-hand how intractable drug
dependency can be, even in a relatively prosperous society, whether
it's with individual heroin and cocaine users in the Downtown
Eastside, crystal-meth labs in the Fraser Valley, or marijuana growing
operations in the Kootenays.

Afghanistan might be on the other side of the world, but the patterns
are familiar. The difference is the magnitude and the impact they have
in a such a fragile society.

Like those in B.C. who have looked at solutions, those in Afghanistan
are finding that 'just saying no' isn't enough, whether the battle is
country-wide or intensely personal.

For Mohammed, as with many addicts, there's a long and broken life
behind his dependence on drugs.

Mohammed, now 33, has the life story of many Afghan men. His family,
originally from the province just west of Kabul, lived a peaceful
existence until the Russian takeover in 1979. His father was a
mechanic and his mother was busy with taking care of him, his five
brothers and three sisters.

He joined the mujahedeen fighting against the Russians in his teens,
as did many of his friends. Then he fought for Rabbani, after that for
the Northern Alliance.

"Every one of us became addicted," says Mohammed, who, with his tanned
and unlined face, looks surprisingly young in a country where men in
their 30s can look closer to 50. Sitting on his hospital bed in
Kabul's only government-run drug-treatment clinic, his feet, marked
with a line of blue dots, tucked close to his body, he tells his story
with little hesitation or fanfare. After all, it's what happened to
everyone here.

He started taking drugs a decade ago to dull the pain of his battle
wounds. On his chest, just above his heart, there's the puckered,
perfectly round mark of a healed bullet hole. On his arm, a pinkish
line of scar tissue from a slash with a knife. Two fingers of his
right hand no longer bend.

But he doesn't just live with physical injuries.

His fiance died six years ago and he has never married. His father
died during the Taliban years, killed when he came to Afghanistan on a
visit from Pakistan, where he was living as a refugee.

He was stopped by the religious police because his beard was
considered too short. He insulted them and a fight broke out. The
family isn't sure what happened, but he disappeared.

"We couldn't find his body," says Mohammed.

Since the Taliban were ousted, he has lived in Kabul with his widowed
mother. He was still managing to work, at a car wash near the
Shahr-e-Naw park in the centre of town, but all of his money was going
to drugs.

On a good day, he would spend only about 200 Afghan dollars (around $6
Cdn) of the 300 a day that he earned. On a bad day, it would be 900 to
1,000, gone in 50-dollar increments for 10-milligram hits of opium or
heroin.

In the only recent attempt to count the number of drug users in Kabul,
it was conservatively estimated there are 11,000 opium users and 7,000
heroin users in the city, where the population is guessed to be around
3.5 million.

Mirwais Yasini, head of Afghanistan's Counter Narcotics Directorate,
says there are at least 100,000 addicts throughout
Afghanistan.

About half are people like Mohammed, people who started using drugs
during the long years of war. The other half are people like his
roommate at the clinic, Mohammed Isah, who became addicted while he
was a refugee.

In Isah's case, it happened while he was working in a marble factory
in Iran, a country whose drug-addiction problem far exceeds that of
the western world. With an estimated two million users, according to
some reports, it has more addicts than all of Europe combined.

There's often a perception that drug addiction is only a problem in
the spoiled and affluent industrialized world, an indulgence that is
the result of a too-easy, hedonistic society where the work ethic is
dead and individualism reigns. The way the stereotype goes, poor
people in developing countries don't use drugs because they still have
close families, strong values, and a culture where drug-taking is
harshly punished instead of being treated like just another lifestyle
choice.

In fact, addiction is rampant in many poor countries, especially those
where the influence of family, values and culture has been lacerated
by civil war, poverty, anarchy, dictatorship, disease, and death on a
massive scale. The Muslim religion has strong prohibitions against
drinking alcohol or taking drugs. But even that prohibition hasn't
been able to overcome the desperate need for escape experienced by
people living in refugee camps who've seen people in their family killed.

Living on a major drug route magnifies the susceptibility.

Besides Iran, drug addiction has become a major social issue in
neighbouring Pakistan, which was the home for several million Afghan
refugees in the last decade, the central Asian republics and, of
course, nearby Russia.

Those countries, like Canada, are struggling to find the best way to
deal with it.

At the national directorate, Dr. Mohammad Zafar, who is overseeing
Afghanistan's drug-demand-reduction programs, says that for a long
time Iran's religious leaders resisted anything that would appear to
condone drug use and took the hardline approach.

That's changed. Two months ago, Zafar went to visit Tehran's
needle-exchange and methadone programs, which are now seen as models
in the region.

Sex-education programs have also been introduced in Iranian schools
and public-health campaigns urge people to wear condoms.

Those are all strategies Zafar would like to see introduced in
Afghanistan.

"This is controversial, but we want to work with the government on
this."

That's a long way off, though. The more immediate problem is treatment.

At the clinic where Mohammed and Isah are hoping to be cured of their
drug habits, there are only 30 beds.

The clinic is part of the city's psychiatric hospital and, as such,
tends to treat drug addiction as an illness that has caused the user
to lose his understanding of his obligation to his family and society.

Treatment starts with 10-day "motivation" sessions, where those hoping
to come into the clinic come for group counselling sessions to be
reminded of all the damage they are doing to those around them.

Psychologist Abdul Saboor Popar, working in a tent in the courtyard of
the hospital, drives home the point that they are bringing shame on
themselves and their families.

"We make the patients believe what we are telling them. We say, 'After
25 years in Afghanistan of this, do you see how many problems have
been caused by drugs?' We remind them that if you do this addiction
for a long time, your wife will be a beggar.'"

The approach and the limited number of beds mean the clinic serves
only a small percentage of the city's thousands of addicts.

The only other clinic in the city, run by a non-profit group, has only
10 beds.

In the rest of the country, there are only a handful of drug-treatment
centres, some of which barely qualify as such.

"In Herat, they have one centre. They call it a treatment centre, but
from our point of view it is a detention centre," Zafar says.

What he'd like to see is at least six treatment centres around the
country, in the six cities whose regions have the biggest problems.
For now, however, there is little sign that those will be built
anytime soon. In Afghanistan, which ranks second-lowest in the world
on the human-development index, where the maternal mortality rate in
some regions is the highest ever recorded, where children routinely
die of common diseases, drug treatment is very low on the priority
list.

But whatever the difficulties are in treating personal addiction, they
pale in comparison to the struggle to find a way to treat
Afghanistan's economic addiction to opium production.

Afghanistan didn't start out as an opium-producing country.

"In contrast to India, Iran and other parts of Asia, opium poppy was not
really a 'traditional crop' in Afghanistan," notes the United Nations' 2003
report on The Opium Economy in Afghanistan: An International Problem.

In 1932, the first year that opium production was measured in the
world, 75 tons was produced in Afghanistan and 6,000 in China.

In the northeastern province of Badakhshan, there were a few signs of
a longstanding opium tradition, but the rest of the country thrived on
a strong agricultural base of legal produce. In the 1950s and '60s,
Afghanistan produced half the world's dried fruits and nuts.

But a perfect storm of local conditions and economic pressure turned
this small country into the opium basket of the world.

Afghanistan had always been a weak cohesion, compared to other nations
that were formed in the 19th and 20th centuries. Even in the 1960s and
1970s, the central government really only had control in Kabul, while
feudal lords, tribal chiefs and mullahs jointly ruled the regions.

After the Soviet invasion of 1979, the country fragmented even more,
as rebel groups fought independently against the Russians. At the same
time Afghanistan was crumbling as a nation, the opium-producing
countries around it were cracking down on drugs.

Starting in 1972, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan started banning or
severely enforcing drug laws.

Afghanistan became the ideal place for a drug economy to flourish. Not
only was the central government effectively non-existent, but two
other factors helped out. The agricultural infrastructure --
irrigation, roads, distribution networks -- had been devastated, which
meant that the subsistence, no-cash economy that had prevailed until
then no longer worked. And the country was filled with warring groups
that needed money to buy arms.

Opium was the perfect product for a country in that state. It didn't
matter if the roads had been destroyed or there were no warehouses.
Opium could be stored indefinitely and it didn't matter how bad the
roads were, since quick transportation wasn't an issue.

The drug could be used as a form of financing, which farmers needed
since they could no longer support themselves with food crops and
needed some kind of cash to buy food.

And local warlords could skim off some of the immense profits of the
opium trade to pay for weapons, so they could continue fighting.

So, as normal food production dropped, farmers turned more and more to
growing opium as a way of supporting themselves. The result: opium
production grew by 15 per cent a year in the country throughout the
1980s, then went up to almost 20 per cent during the civil war period
of 1989 to 1994. Under the Taliban regime, from 1996 to 2001, it
doubled again.

Now, the question for Afghanistan's transitional government and its
international backers is how to break the country's addiction to such
a profitable crop.

There isn't anyone familiar with the region who hasn't emphasized how
destructive opium is for Afghanistan's future. The World Bank, local
aid organizations, the former Canadian commander of NATO troops there,
and President Hamid Karzai have all warned about the danger of the
country become a "narco-economy."

In Canada, the illegal drug economy may have its negative consequences
- -- unpaid taxes, organized crime affiliations, fire hazards -- but
it's not the force it is in Afghanistan.

"Cannabis production in B.C. is not destabilizing the government.
Here, it is," says Adam Bouloukos, a bursting-with-energy New
York-born criminologist who is head of the Afghanistan effort for the
United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime.

"In Kandahar, all the judges closed up shop because they said, 'We're
not independent.' In Faisabad, we asked the judges how many drug cases
they had and they said none. They're not allowed by the local
commander to do drug cases."

That drug-economy dominance has all kinds of impacts. At the bottom
end, it sucks up local labour, so that it's impossible to find workers
to even try to develop alternative industries. It's even one of the
causes for the high desertion rates in the Afghan army, as recruits
have abandoned the army to go home and make much more money from
working in the poppy fields. At the top end, it gives regional
commanders, who cream off some of the profits, the cash flow to
maintain armies and independence from the central government.

In spite of that daunting situation, Bouloukos and others don't think
Afghanistan is a hopeless case that should simply be abandoned.

He points to Thailand and Pakistan as countries that managed to turn
their opium industry around.

But it takes a long time -- a generation -- and Afghanistan is a more
fragile country.

It also takes a fine balance of pushing and pulling to convince
farmers to turn to other, legal crops.

Just burning their fields isn't the solution, says Bouloukos. If they
have nothing else to turn to, nothing has been accomplished.

The trick is to combine some negative forces -- going after the
mid-level infrastructure like opium-production centres, markets, and
trucking routes, laying criminal charges against traffickers and
putting some pressures on farmers through fines and limited crop
burning -- with a lot of positive alternatives. Those alternatives may
not provide the same profit as opium, but the hope is that, if both
sides of the equation are operating, farmers will come to a decision
that they'd rather grow a lower-income but legal crop over a
high-income but illegal one.

While there's a lot of trendy talk about saffron, a crop that is worth
almost as much as opium, as a replacement, Bouloukos says he sees
little sign that it's a real solution. Although there are some farmers
experimenting with saffron, they are competing against other countries
that already have strong distribution networks in a market that is not
that large.

He is more hopeful about projects like one operating in the southern
province of Helmand, where the non-profit Central Asian Development
Group is reviving the pomegranate industry.

That means it hasn't just encouraged farmers to grow pomegranates and
abandoned them to their own devices after that. The organization is
also working on developing markets throughout Asia and building up the
network needed to support those farmers, from roads to warehouses.

But, says Bouloukos, it's all going to take time.

"The problem is, people need to be patient. But we're nibbling at the
edges. I think the momentum is building."

If only the international community keeps supporting Afghanistan, if
only its own institutions keep getting stronger and more able to
function on their own, and if only everything doesn't fall apart.

Frances Bula recently spent seven weeks on assignment in
Afghanistan.

Disturbing Numbers

Statistics show the fallout from Afghanistan's dependence on the
poppy:

* Afghanistan currently supplies 75 per cent of the world's heroin

* An estimated 1.7 million Afghans were involved in opium growing in
2003

* Kabul has:

An estimated 24,000 hashish users.

14,000 people addicted to tranquillizers, painkillers and
pharmaceutical drugs.

11,000 opium users.

7,000 heroin users.

6,500 alcoholics

Source: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime