PAKISTAN'S HEROIN ADDICTION BOMB

2 Million Of The 'Living Dead' Prowl Urban Areas

KARACHI, Pakistan -- They are called the "living dead" -- scavenging for
food in the dirtiest of the open garbage heaps, or squatting cock-style in
rows in front of cheap Karachi hotels in congested market places just in
case any pious customer may buy them a free meal. They can be seen sitting
in a group on road pavements, or even inside the manholes of the underground
drainage lines, inhaling the lethal whitish fumes.

They are called heroinchis, or heroin addicts, easily identified because of
their dirty shalwar-kamiz (baggy Pakistani suits), unshaven face, the lost
gaze in their eyes and the pale color of their skin.

As the world marks the "International Drugs Eradication Day," there is
little hope that any good would come to these heroin addicts who number 2
million in Pakistan today. "Between themselves these 2 million heroin
addicts puff away 130 metric tons of the deadly white powder each year,"
says noted Pakistani psychiatrist Dr. Saleem Azam, lamenting that facilities
to treat or rehabilitate the heroin addicts are almost non-existent in the
country. The last national survey showed that the number of heroin addicts
had grown 7 percent per year between 1988 to 1993, and Azam conservatively
estimates the same growth rate from 1993 onwards. This translates into 16
new heroin addicts with each passing hour.

A significant percentage of the heroin addicts are street dwellers, and what
is most ominous is that at least 10 percent of such street heroin addicts
are children, experts say. Entire families are vulnerable to the deadly
addiction in Pakistan today, because already 8 percent of the total heroin
addicts are women.

There is a diabolical link between heroin addiction and peddling. "A study
showed that 76 percent of all heroin addicts themselves retail the drug to
support their addiction. The addict buys an extra packet for Rs 50 ($1) and
sells it for Rs 75 ($1.5), earning half the money for the next packet for
himself," Azam said. Thus, as the number of addicts goes on increasing,
there is a corresponding rise in the sales force.

Curing the addicts and bringing them back to sobriety may remain an elusive
dream. The detoxification takes about 15 days and this is done in centers
where the addicts are kept locked "because the urge for that last puff is so
strong, that seldom does a heroin addict have the will power to continue
treatment if his mobility is not checked." The cost of the detoxification
treatment is at least $10 per day, which means that in a country where the
average per capita income is $483 per annum nearly 99 percent of the addicts
can never afford to come to these centers.

But the more painful and slow process is that of rehabilitation, because
experts say this is the real test for any cleaning up. There are hardly five
rehabilitation centers of any repute for heroin addicts throughout Pakistan
and, at any given time, they can in total lodge less than 3,000 patients.
Reaching a rehabilitation center does not hold any guarantee of divorcing
the drug for life.

Those who run the centers concede that less than 5 percent of all who come
to them quit the killer drug for good, while 95 percent get hooked again. In
most cases, heroin is sold in Pakistan cities under the watchful eyes of the
police, who have a stake in the local drug trade. For instance in Karachi's
oldest shanty area of Lyari, also called the Harlem of Pakistan, drug
peddling is a thriving business and continues from dawn well until midnight
in the presence of the police. The drug barons are Afghans, Iranians or
Pakistanis belonging to the ethnic Pakthun community, the middlemen and
peddlers are of the Baloch ethnicity, and the customers are mainly from the
Mohajir ethnic community.

Gunfights between rival drug gangs often break out in this otherwise sleepy
locality, but police seldom intervene because of obvious reasons. Public
opinion is unanimous in blaming the military junta that ruled Pakistan
during the 1980s for the heroin curse. At the time, a bloody, communists vs.
Mujahideen war -- the former helped by the erstwhile Red Army and the latter
aided by the U.S. CIA -- was being staged in neighboring Afghanistan. With
the West looking the other way, and fully backing the military dictators,
heroin addiction made inroads in Pakistan society. It's an open secret that
the Afghan Mujahideen transported the first consignments of the deadly
powder to Pakistan in the early 1980s when Afghanistan was under Russian
occupation. But now there is no turning back the clock of history. The hope
is fast fading that the war against heroin, even though it may be started in
real earnest, can ever be won. Afghanistan produced 3,269 metric tons of
opium in 1998 -- up by 16 percent over the year before -- and the area under
cultivation rose to 63,674 hectares in 1998, or an increase of nine percent
as compared to 1997.

The ruling Taleban's drug controlling authorities see no evil in poppy
cultivation, arguing that Islam allowed adherents to do forbidden things
when human lives were under threat. The Taleban warriors imply that if the
Afghan farmers were not allowed to cultivate poppy, they may as well starve
to death.

Reports say lush green poppy fields can be seen in Afghanistan's Kandahar
valley, once a granary of apples, grapes and other fruits. The apple
production in this area before the war (1979 to date) was so huge that
villagers used the fruit to clean themselves after attending a "call of
nature." But now the poppy is the most favored cash crop -- one kilogram of
which fetches the farmer around 50 U.S. dollars. The farmers say that no one
in his right mind would replace poppy with wheat, which would sell for less
than a dollar.

Authoritative press reports say international drug barons from Turkey, Iran,
Pakistan, Central Asia and elsewhere are regular visitors to a place called
Sangin inside Afghanistan with opium shops galore. The opium is refined to
heroin either in Afghanistan itself or in the no-man's tribal land in
adjacent areas of Pakistan and smuggled into Pakistani cities. Commanders of
assorted factions of the Mujahideen groups, notably the ruling Taleban, hold
a big stake in the heroin smuggling.

"Armed to the teeth, the smugglers move in convoys of the latest model
four-wheel vehicles, fitted with state-of-the-art communication equipment.
When we see them coming our way, we have to make way for them," said a major
in the Pakistan army's Frontier Corps, that guard the borders with Iran and
Afghanistan. In Iran, the carriers get the payments in the form of bag-loads
of dollars and the heroin is then transported in other vehicles to Turkey,
and from there smuggled across Western Europe. Other convoys snake through
smuggler routes in the rugged terrain of Pakistan's southwestern Balochistan
province and reach Karachi, the commercial capital of Pakistan. A part of
the heroin is consumed locally here and the rest is sea-shipped to Europe
via East African ports and the gold-glittering free port of Dubai in the Gulf.