Addiction
Behind The Burka
By Nick Meo
01 October, 2004
The Independent
Halima first smoked opium to dull the
nightmares after her husband's violent death. He was shot at a checkpoint
in front of her as they tried to flee fighting in Kabul, leaving her
a widow at the age of 27 with three young children and a joyless future
to look forward to.
"I don't know
who fired the shot," she said. "But I couldn't stop playing
back my memories of him bleeding to death in the street and nobody to
help." In the twilight half-life of an Afghan widow there was little
distraction until a neighbour introduced her to a brown paste.
Soon she needed
to smoke opium in the morning, at lunchtime and at night. "It gives
me comfort and helps me forget my sorrows," she said. "It
is a shameful thing. If my brother-in-law found out he would throw me
out of his house."
Since Alexander
the Great's troops first arrived with opium in central Asia, it has
been widely used as a medicine there. Traditionally, the dry opium was
considered an astringent, and was also used as a sedative. Even the
husks of the poppy are boiled to make a tea to soothe crying children.
Taking opiates is
haram, or forbidden, in Islam. Although Afghanistan is the largest grower
of poppies and the leading supplier of opium, heroin and morphine, its
use remained mostly medicinal even as the international drugs trade
moved in during the 1980s. Farmers overcame their scruples to grow it
for export but community disapproval nearly always prevented abuse at
home.
Finally, however,
the opium trade which caused such misery in the West has rebounded on
Afghanistan. Kabul now has an estimated 60,000 drug addicts, their ranks
swelled by returnees who picked up the habit in the grim refugee camps
of Pakistan and Iran.
Doctors in the Afghan
capital fear things are going to get much worse. Dr Ahmad Shah Habib,
director of the Nejaf rehabilitation centre, said: "Fifteen years
ago heroin was unknown in Kabul. Now traffickers have a free run and
you can buy it in any bazaar in the city. Ten years ago when we started
there were perhaps 4,000 addicts in the city. Now there are 15 times
that number."
The addicts are
not difficult to find. They live in the worst of the city's bombed-out
ruins - places shunned even by the most desperate homeless families.
Known as poderi, the ragged figures crawl out of sight to "chase
the dragon" or share filthy needles. Like anywhere else in the
world, they pay for it through crime or prostitution.
Afghan women are
particularly at risk. The Nejaf Centre knows of around 2,000 female
drug abusers and believes there are far more. Most are too ashamed to
seek treatment, hiding their habit from their husbands and families.
Nearly all have harrowing stories of loss from the war. Most are widows,
some are first wives who have suffered the humiliation of their husband
taking a second bride. Babies are being born addicted and children working
in the carpet trade are allegedly fed opium to numb them through long
hours of work; they too become addicts.
While opium and
sleeping pills are still the commonest drugs abused here, young women
are increasingly turning to heroin. The growth of heroin factories inside
the country and the increasing sophistication of the Afghan drugs industry
means production is far greater than before. Most of the refined drug
is smuggled out to lucrative Western markets, leaving huge amounts of
poor quality smack to be sold cheaply in the city bazaars.
In one clinic I
visited in Kabul's stinking old city, a roomful of women in stained
burkas were receiving treatment for addiction. One had become hooked
on opium after using it to numb her fear so she could sleep during the
rocket attacks in the civil war, another turned to tranquillisers after
her husband and son were killed by a warlord's rocket.
Treatment does not
always work. One 60-year-old grandmother picked up a heroin habit from
a friend she made in the hospital ward where she was seeking treatment
for her opium addiction.
Dr Habib said: "War
trauma is by far the biggest factor among those using opiates. Even
if they didn't start abuse during the war, the nightmares are still
with them years later." Dr Habib has no idea how prevalent HIV
is in Afghanistan yet, but with needle sharing increasing, poor hygiene,
and many addicts working as prostitutes, he has no doubt that the 300
cases identified so far will increase.
"This is a
problem which we will only start to see emerge in another five years,"
he said.