END OF THE ROAD FOR THE VICTIMS OF AFGHAN HEROIN

First you see one man crouching with his face to the wall, then another,
then a third, and others again a little further on. In this part of the
world men crouch when they urinate. Could they all be urinating at the same
time?

On closer inspection, it turns out they are up to something else. They put
a little heroin on a piece of aluminium foil, set light to it and then
stick a straw into one of their nostrils in order to inhale as much of the
acrid smoke as possible.

Most of these furtive figures glimpsed in Jamrou, a seedy suburb of the
western Pakistani city, Peshawar, have come to the end of the road; they
are going to die, and most of them are not yet 20 years old.

On one side of the road, next to the Qissa Khawani bazaar, there is a
police road block. It is a rudimentary affair: a length of tree trunk
manned by half a dozen armed police. Their main aim is to prevent Western
journalists from entering the bazaar, where arms and drugs dealing is rife.

To get round the road block, one simply needs to cross the road and walk
along a rusting railway line. There the junkies skulk in the shadows of
carpenter's workshops.

The same zombies - Afizullah, Majid and Abdullah - turn up a little later
at the detox centre, which is nothing more than a two-room adobe building,
run by Parvez Azzam Khan, a retired doctor. She says that when she first
started her clinic the drug pushers of Jamrou did not appreciate her
initiative: "When they came to see me, I explained to them that I was
trying to help their clients stay alive. They then stopped bothering me."

In a small courtyard 20 men with scruffy beards enjoy their daily ration of
tea with milk and a piece of nan (flat bread). Their eyes are glazed over,
their voices thick and hoarse, and their sense of balance almost
non-existent. One of them staggers over to us and collapses on a pot of
flowers. Another begs for money, "so I can eat," he says with his mouth full.

Abdul Mahir, a 28-year-old exile from the Panjsher valley in Afghanistan,
spent six years "like that lot there", struggling to survive from one fix
to the next. A former mojahedin who lost his way, he is now cured of drugs.
"In the Panjsher valley I already smoked a lot," he remembers. "There are
endless poppy fields in the region, but the heroin also came from
Badakhshan province."

He had to be extremely cautious, as the Taliban have a radical cure. "They
would cut the hand off anyone found taking heroin," he says.

Parvez uses a milder technique. She gives her clients Benzedrine to get
them off drugs. It does not work terribly well, but she has no alternative.
"We take in about 50 people every day, but no one helps us," she says.

A shot of "high-quality" heroin costs 300 rupees (about $4), but the poison
taken by the human wrecks of Jamrou costs ten times less. "Sometimes one
even finds washing powder in the stuff they take, the poor things," Parvez
says.

It is a lethal cocktail. Since the beginning of the year, her centre has
collected 41 corpses in the district. In 23 cases no one came to claim
their bodies.