HIGH ON HEROIN: MAKING A CRUEL HASH OF AFGHAN LIVES

Adam Harvey Witnesses The Misery Of The War-Ravaged Junkies In Peshawar

Heroin may steal Qadeer's future but it has not yet robbed him of his past,
so the 35-year-old former mujahideen lifts his robes to show the scars from
a Russian bullet: a prune-shaped scar in the flesh just behind his knee.

But wait, he murmurs, there's more. He bends at the waist and bunches his
robes up to the middle of his back until we can see the two-inch-long
bullet track seared into the skin beside his spine. Qadeer's gap-toothed
smile fades as he slowly lets his clothing drop back down. The ex-warrior
retreats into his narcosis.

Twenty years of war in Afghanistan have helped to create one of the world's
most severe heroin problems, thanks to the drug's favourite formula: cheap
narcotics and miserable people. By 1993 this mix had helped to create an
estimated 1.3 million addicts living in Pakistan.

Here in Peshawar, near the border, the majority of the users are Afghans.
Whether they first take the drug in the city or in one of the surrounding
refugee camps, most of the city's users end up living and scoring in a
junkies' strip beside the railway line, a few metres into the wild side of
the nation's lawless tribal territories. They chase the dragon in the lee
of M Hayat Bros' furniture factory. The dealers operate from the other side
of the street.

The white-robed merchants also sell guns, and all day long they bring their
customers to stand on a nearby wall to test imitation Kalashnikovs they
shoot into the ground and the rapid pop-pop-pop is an appropriate
soundtrack for this sad and desolate place. Twenty-three graves have been
dug in this junkies' alley this year. Those next in line for a hole in the
ground squat amongst the graves with their foil and matches and straws.

Smoking heroin is not a cost-effective way of using but the drug here is so
cheap that few addicts bother to inject, says Dr Parveen Azam Khan, the
director of a local drug rehabilitation organisation called Dost a Pashtun
word for 'friend'. Most users spend about 90 rupees (about £1.20) each day
for about one gram of Afghani heroin.

Bahar Ahmed, 29, used heroin here by the furniture factory until four years
ago. He's an educated, English-speaking graduate who is delighted to have a
second attempt at a life. Now he works here counselling addicts including
many people he formerly used drugs with.

We find him squatting on the ground near the railway lines, surrounded by a
dozen doped-up and dirty users. As we approach they stand and stagger about
before finally pulling themselves together enough to hold hands and link
into a ragged circle while Bahar leads them in a Pashtu (Afghan language)
chant.

"It was the serenity prayer," he explains later: "God grant me the serenity
to accept the things that I cannot change, the courage to change the things
I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." He is living proof that
there's an escape from heroin, a better life.

Because this is no life at all. A 60-year-old Afghani man lies on the
ground, his forearm resting on his head. Flies crawl over his slack lips
and on to his gums. His front teeth are missing, he's covered in scabs and
sores, and he is the sickest man I have seen in this country full of ill
and maimed and deformed people. I was told that he died the day after I
visited the camp.

A 32-year-old black man sits by himself on a nearby wall. He looks in
better condition than most of the users here, until I sit next to him and
look into his dead eyes and see his thin goatee beard is matted with dried
blood and pus. He is Hatiba Kiota, from Tanzania. He came here 10 years ago
for his sister's wedding and never left, he explains in mumbled but fluent
English. He has lost his passport and documents, so now he cannot go
anywhere. He sleeps on the ground and washes his clothes in the open drain
that runs in a ditch beside the wall.

Hatiba is an outsider amongst a community of outsiders. Most of the addicts
here are from Afghanistan and they all use the drug to deaden their
feelings about their brutal lives, says Dr Zakir Shuaib, a Peshawar
psychologist who has been working with the city's addicts for 10 years.
"War trauma can by psychological or it can be physical. Some people start
using to kill the physical pain you have to remember that these are the
most vulnerable people in our society. They are strangers, they are mobile,
they have lost families, they suffer unemployment and they suffer
homelessness," says Dr Shuaib.

Inayat Khan has endured most of these problems, and he's just 13 years old.
He was born in Afghanistan and came to Peshawar as a refugee. His father
and cousins have no work, he says, so they used to use a lot of hash. So
did Inayat, but he first smoked heroin two years ago inside his family's
mud brick home in a local refugee camp. He mixed the powder with some
tobacco and packed it into a cigarette, inhaled and vomited. The nausea
stopped after a month but the need was there to stay.

When Inayat's father found out about the heroin he tried to treat his son
with stick therapy. Did that work? Inayat smiles. "It made me want to use
even more." His father bought an iron ring and some chains and manacled
Inayat to the floor. Inayat escaped. By then he was using daily, he says,
smoking up to two grams of heroin inside 10 cigarettes. Inayat funded his
habit by stealing scrap metal.

Dr Shuaib met the boy inside Peshawar Central Prison and brought him to
Dost's local rehabilitation clinic. Inayat's been here, been clean, for
four months. Narcotics Anonymous meetings and daily counselling sessions
have kept him sane, and the activities at the live-in centre have kept him
busy. But soon, says Dr Shuaib, Inayat must go home. Back to the refugee
camp, back to a city of unhappy people back to a place with few jobs and no
schools and lots of cheap Afghani heroin.

It's not much of a location for a second chance at life.