ADDICTS HOOKED ON HEROIN LIVE IN PAKISTAN CITY DRAIN

QUETTA, Pakistan - Ragged men with sickly yellowed faces tread
through trash and wastewater to the junkie slum in Quetta's main
drain - a pit of filth and disease where heroin from nearby
Afghanistan sells like candy.

They call it home, this scene from hell in the southwestern Pakistan
city of Quetta. For a dollar they can smoke away their troubles. If
they die, the pushers will pay other addicts to dump the bodies by the road.

Tentacles of the booming narcotics trade reach from Afghanistan, 2
1/2 hours' drive away, into Quetta's back streets where the drug is
smoked or injected, and into the pockets of corrupt officials and police.

About 400 addicts live in hovels that line the wide, open drain.
Hundreds of others visit daily, climbing in under a bridge near an
entrance to the city's vast military garrison with its smart army
barracks and tended lawns.

Among them are listless, barefoot boys, gray-bearded men and even
government officials who come for a fix before and after work. They
huddle around charcoal burners and candles placed on upturned bricks,
smoking hashish and brown heroin that bubbles and melts on tin foil
before they inhale its fumes.

"It's easier for us to get heroin than it is to quit," said Jan Bibi,
looking haggard beyond her 40 years as she stared from beneath a
grubby shawl. Her brother introduced her to the drug to "relax" her
after her husband beat her.

Her son, Dad Mohammed, 18, was already an addict. He started at age 11.

"Nobody accepts us in society. Everybody hates us. They abuse us in
the street," he said, his hands trembling eight hours after his last smoke.

Aftab Ali works for a charity, the Milo Shahid Trust, which runs
detoxification and rehab programs. He sees new faces at the slum each
time he visits the drain, twice a week - people from Quetta, refugees
from Afghanistan, addicts from other parts of Pakistan who come for
the cheap and plentiful drugs.

According to dated and imprecise statistics, the nation of 160
million people has half a million heroin users.

Ali said there are at least 5,000 to 6,000 addicts at about a dozen
hangouts around Quetta.

But he added that the population is transient, so it's unclear if
numbers are increasing because of the huge output of drugs from
Afghanistan, the world's top opium producer.

Superintendent Qazi Abdul Wahid said police do pursue traffickers but
conceded that low salaries breed corruption. A policeman earns $65 to
$83 a month, a superintendent $420.

A sad camaraderie exists among the addicts who support themselves by
begging and petty crime. They pick the lice from each other's matted
hair in the shacks they share, the grimy brick walls sometimes
decorated with fraying posters of Indian movie stars.

Many complain they can't afford to quit - a two-month rehab program
at the Shahid Trust costs $65. But they get little public sympathy.

"If we just shot three or four of these guys, then they would quit,"
said Gul Khan, an excise department official.