Taliban Stamping Out Hashish

By GRETCHEN PETERS

ARGHANDAB, Afghanistan (AP) Talk about cold turkey.

The Taliban religious army, known for its strict interpretation of Islamic
law and its stiff punishments for those who break it, has established its own
threestep program for hashish smokers:

Beat them until they confess who their dealer is.

Give them an automatic jail term.

Dunk them in an icewater bath for three excruciating hours a day until their
habit is broken.

In a country where hashish use has long been epidemic, with young men smoking
up to 20 druglaced cigarettes a day, the approach is remarkably effective.

Market sellers in nearby Kandahar, the southern city where the Taliban
movement began nearly three years ago, said they no longer sell the
cannabisbased drug.

One convicted user said he had completely sworn off the stuff. ``When they
put me in that cold water, I forget all about hashish,'' said Bakht Mohammed.

The Taliban's tough approach has some international organizations wondering
why it has not mounted an equally enthusiastic campaign against the
production of opium, which is used to make heroin sold in Western nations.

The Taliban controls southern Afghanistan, where most of the country's 2,300
tons of opium is produced each year. According to the U.N. Drug Control
program, Afghanistan now rivals Burma as the world's largest opium producer.

Sitting in his dark shoe box of an office, Abdul Rashid, who heads the
antidrug effort in Kandahar, says he lacks the resources to take on the
opium trade. The Taliban administration has given him 10 men and a single
rusty motorbike to chase smugglers along the bumpy, dirt roads.

The smugglers they do catch generally get one year in jail and have their
goods confiscated.

Rashid also fears trouble from farmers, if anyone tried to ban cultivation of
the bloodred poppy that opium comes from.

``We should not forget about the people if they need money it is unfair to
stop them from growing it,'' he said.

Poppies sell for five times the price of other crops, including wheat,
cucumber and grapes. What's more, local traders pay in advance, giving
impoverished farmers much needed cash to buy seeds and fertilizer.

One poppy farmer, Wali Jan, said he earns the equivalent of $1,300 a year
from his crop a huge sum in a country where a lawyer might make $100 a
year. With 14 mouths to feed in his family, Jan calls it a matter of
survival.

``How can I feed them otherwise?'' he said.

When the Taliban took control of the area nearly three years ago, some
foreign governments hoped their strict version of Islamic life would prompt
them to outlaw poppy production.

Instead, the trade in opium, which unlike hashish is an item for export to
the West rather than local consumption, has flourished.

The farmers say the local mullahs, or clerics who administer the area, have
not told them to stop growing poppies, and some even charge them the 10
percent tax levied for agricultural products.

With its wellknown talent for inspiring fear of punishment, the Taliban
would only have to ban poppy cultivation for it to stop, farmers say.

``No one would dare oppose the Taliban,'' said Abdul Parveen as he tilled his
poppy plants on small plot of land.

However, Kandahar's governor, Mohammed Hassan Rehman, insists the Taliban is
``very much interested in substituting this crop with another.''

But in the lush valley of Arghandab, less than six miles from Kandahar,
fields of poppies stretch for miles.

Smuggled to small laboratories tucked away in the rugged tribal region along
the border with Pakistan, the opium is processed into heroin and transported
by truck south to Pakistan's Arabian Sea coast or west through neighboring
Iran, international drug enforcement agencies say.

The United Nations says most of it eventually ends up in Europe and the
United States.