ADDICTIVE HARVEST GRIPS A NATION

KABUL, Afghanistan - Sabera came to the new treatment center for
female drug addicts with a plan. In five days, she would check in
along with her daughter, and this time she would leave heroin forever.

And then Sabera went home. Within minutes she started smoking the
brown powder on a small canoe-shaped piece of foil. So did her two
children. Her son, Zaher, is 14. Her daughter, Gulpari, is 12. The
family slumped on cushions against a wall. Zaher barely held his eyes
open, rubbed his stomach and muttered, "God, God." Gulpari cuddled
against her mother. Their fingers were black with tar.

"I feel very sad about it," said Sabera, who, like many Afghans, has
no last name. She guesses she is about 45. "It's my fault they're
addicted. It's my fault they can't quit."

In this land where more opium and heroin are produced than the entire
world consumes, Afghans are increasingly hooked on their own product.
And now, Afghan doctors say, more and more women - desperate to escape
depression or pain - are using the drug. The women suck on pea-sized
pieces of opium beneath their tongues, chew it or drink it with tea.
Like Sabera, some have started to smoke heroin, which is more refined
than opium and considered much more addictive.

Women Only

Often, mothers take their children with them. They give the skin of
the addictive poppy fruit to hungry babies to make them feel full.
They blow smoke in the mouths of crying toddlers to quiet them. Or, as
Sabera says she did two years ago, they say yes to children who wonder
what their mother is doing and want to try it.

In July, responding to the capital's growing problem, a new drug
treatment center opened for women in Kabul. It is the city's eighth
treatment center to open since the fall of the Taliban, which largely
banned poppies, and is the first in-patient clinic that treats only
women.

"There are families where the whole family is using heroin," said a
doctor, Shaista, who has only one name. He is the coordinator of the
government-run Sanga Amaj Drug Treatment Center, which keeps patients
for a month and then gives follow-up treatment.

For generations Afghans have grown poppies in the country's arid
climate, but they traditionally didn't use heroin. Instead, raw opium
was exported and refined into heroin for sale in the West.

Since the Taliban was toppled in 2001, poppies have threatened to
carpet much of Afghanistan's agricultural land, especially in the
south. And increasingly, heroin is being processed inside the country,
according to the United Nations and local authorities.

The annual poppy survey by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime,
released last month, showed yet another record-breaking year for
poppies in Afghanistan, which now is nearly the world's exclusive
supplier of heroin. No other country has produced narcotics on such a
scale since China in the 19th century.

Opium production in Afghanistan now exceeds the world's demand by more
than 3,000 tons, the report said, adding that this year's harvest may
kill, directly and indirectly, more than 100,000 people worldwide.

Homegrown

As the amount of poppies has skyrocketed, more Afghans have started
using the drug.

Almost 1 million, or 1 in 32, Afghans use drugs, from illicit
prescription drugs to heroin, according to a recent study by the
Ministry of Counter Narcotics

About 7 percent are children, and 13 percent are women, ministry
spokesman Zalmai Afzali said. Last year there were 13 treatment
centers in the country. Now there are 27.

"And still these are not enough," Afzali said.

The situation has gotten so bad that the head cleric at the Shrine of
Ali in Kabul has started lecturing at Friday prayers against drug use
and allowing treatment centers to advertise over mosque
loudspeakers.

The reasons for the worsening problem are varied. Drugs are everywhere
here, and they're cheap. Sabera or her son has to walk only 20 minutes
and spend only $2 to get the family high.

Many returning refugees from Iran and Pakistan also have come home as
addicts, doctors say. In remote areas opium may be the only medicine
available.

Sabera said she started using opium after her husband, a cleric, died
of a heart attack four years ago. She was depressed, she was poor, she
was in pain. She moved on to heroin.