President Karzai certainly has pressing political reasons to control the exponentially increasing harvests of opium poppies which are supplying his opposition with the wealth necessary to maintain militias, purchase weaponry and threaten the stability of the country. But a new crisis is looming on the horizon which Afghanistan has not had to deal with in the past: drug addiction and a lack of treatment facilities.
Interestingly, the Taliban government was quite successful in stopping opium production during the last year or so of their rule, as this UK study shows. But with the overthrow of the Taliban, Afghanistan is now beginning to experience a public health crisis of drug addition, which may be compounded with a rise in AIDS/HIV and other diseases from shared needles.
Until recently, the use of heroin – a 20th Century invention which can only be made with specialist chemicals – was relatively rare in Afghanistan, largely because most of the processing was done outside the country. That has changed with the return of millions of refugees from neighbouring Pakistan and Iran. Many became regular heroin users there and they have brought the practice and the demand home with them. It is difficult to get accurate figures, but one estimate is that Kabul alone has at least 20,000 heroin addicts.
Just two years after the fall of the Taleban – who banned opium poppy cultivation – the country’s illegal drugs trade has grown so big many believe it now threatens Afghanistan’s stability. Last year, the trade generated $2.3bn in revenue for traffickers, almost as much as the country received in aid.
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