NEW TREASURE ALONG ANCIENT SILK ROAD

Smugglers take opium from Afghan mountains to European markets

OSH, Kyrgyzstan--FIRST Ravshan became an opium addict; then he found a new
career. His suppliers paid him in fat packets of white powder to shuttle
their product from this remote corner of Central Asia to new customers in
Russia.

Ravshan is thousands of miles from New York, where a drug summit was held
last week at the United Nations. But he is exactly the kind of person
President Clinton and other world leaders will have to reach if they are to
make a dent in the world's multibillion-dollar drug trade, as they have pledged.

Ravshan once was a captain of a corps of drug addicts and unemployed women
conscripted to work as smugglers. With wads of opium and heroin nestled at
the bottom of cheap Chinese bags, Ravshan's team would fan out across the
grassy Asian steppe. They traveled by train and bus, following the route of
the ancient Silk Road, once traversed by camels laden with the luxuries of
the East.

These days, the old Silk Road has become a modern-day Heroin Trail, allowing
opium harvested in Afghanistan to reach markets in Europe and China. In
fact, experts say, more narcotics now pass through this region than through
the so-called Southeast Asian ``Golden Triangle'' countries of Burma and
Thailand.

About 220 pounds of processed opium is smuggled across Central Asia each
week, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in
London. Just as the new Central Asian states are struggling to build stable
democracies, the drug trade threatens to turn them into ``narcocracies,''
the Institute warned.

Osh, a 3,000-year-old trading post at the base of the craggy Pamir
Mountains, has become a major hub on the new drug route. Among its 500,000
residents -- many now unemployed -- are plenty of people willing to travel
the Heroin Trail to earn $100. An estimated one out of 10 of these new
smugglers are women, who make the best smugglers because police in this
Muslim-dominated culture are reticent to search them.

Known locally as khanka, opium has long been part of the culture of Central
Asia. But with the breakup of the Soviet Union, the erosion of government
authority and the ensuing economic collapse, khanka has become a driving
force in the region, creating a booming new industry and thousands of new
addicts like Ravshan.

Until Ravshan, 35, checked himself into a drug clinic last month, his drug
caravan was transporting as much as 11 pounds of narcotics on each trip to
Russia's big cities. He began smuggling drugs after he lost his job in 1991
when his factory went bust. During his five years as a smuggler, he said, he
never failed to make a delivery.

``I was highly motivated,'' he recalled with a bitter glance at the rivulets
of veins running down his bony arms.

Ravshan said he finally found his own ``interior power'' -- and the $154 fee
- -- to drag himself in for treatment. But there are still dozens of others
just like him, all moving westward with their plastic-wrapped sacks of drugs.

``It used to be just a bad habit here, but now it's big business,'' said
Kamil Abdurakhmanov, head of the Osh police department's anti-drug squad.
The police here have been trying to contain the torrent of drug traffic with
a staff of 19 and a single Russian-made car.

``There are 100 places in Osh where you can buy khanka,'' he said.

Officials estimate there are as many as 200,000 addicts in Kyrgyzstan, once
the farthest outpost of the Soviet empire, wedged between Uzbekistan and
China. The number of addicts in Osh's treatment center -- a tiny fraction of
the city's total -- has doubled in the last two years.

According to Alexander Zelichenko, coordinator of the United Nations
Anti-Drug Project in Osh, two important developments occurred
simultaneously: A Russian market for drugs opened up, and Iran, once on the
drug smuggling route, launched a strict anti-drug campaign, virtually
sealing its border with Afghanistan.

So, the drug traders headed north. ``Within six months, we here in
Kyrgyzstan were already feeling the effect,'' Zelichenko said.

Osh's strategic location in the lush Fergana Valley makes it a logical
transfer point for Afghan opium. It is here that the first wave of smugglers
arrive after taking the ``route beyond the clouds,'' a grueling trek to
Kyrgyzstan across the Afghan border into Tajikistan and down the
12,000-foot-high passes of the Pamir Mountains -- a place known as the
``roof of the world.''

After hauling their loads of raw opium gum by foot, donkey and --
increasingly -- flashy, Japanese-made, four-wheel-drive vehicles, Osh looms
like an oasis in the flatlands, the first big settlement in the desolate region.

For many of the 4 million people in the leafy, slow-moving villages around
Osh, where nearly all the factories are closed, the drug trade is the only
viable business left.

The criminal trade has rapidly permeated the tradition-bound societies of
Central Asia.

``If a woman has 10 or 11 children, a husband who is an addict or has no
job, what else can she do?'' Zelichenko asked.

Like Ravshan, the smugglers who cross the Pamirs to deliver opium to Osh
have been impoverished by the Soviet collapse. Most are Tajiks from the
isolated and ungovernable region of Gorno-Badakhshan, where drug lords rule
and no one pays much attention to officials in the capital, Dushanbe. A
perpetual civil war has raged there since the Soviet government fell in 1991.

These Tajik smugglers purchase raw opium -- the gum scraped from poppy
flowers -- for a mere $50 a pound. If the sticky gum is refined in one of
the new drug factories that have sprung up in Gorno-Badakhshan, it can be
sold for $350 in Osh. If it's further distilled into heroin, the price
shoots up to $5,000. By the time a pound of pure heroin reaches Moscow,
dealers will pay $75,000. In the past year, the smugglers crossing into
Kyrgyzstan have increasingly switched to heroin. At one-tenth the weight of
opium, it's easier to carry and more profitable.

It's also harder for the harried Kyrgyz border guards at the Archally post
to detect in the trucks and cars heading north along the Silk Road.

The switch from opium to processed heroin means that more local addicts will
turn to heroin, which is harder to treat than opium.

``I never even treated a heroin addict until a few months ago,'' said
Kantbek Kanzhebayev, Ravshan's doctor at the Osh clinic.

There are just 20 beds for the region, which probably has 25,000 addicts. In
the same room where Ravshan rested, three other addicts writhed on metal
cots, undergoing a controlled form of withdrawal.

Ravshan, at least, had already started to return to life. He stood up
unsteadily from his cot and walked slowly into a small garden, where his
wife, Adina, stood waiting.

``For five years I was daily drunk. I've had enough,'' Ravshan said quietly.
``There are lots of problems for me to fix. I just hope it's not too late.''

Checked-by: Melodi Cornett