Drug Addiction, and Misery, Increase in Afghanistan
Started using when refugees in other countries, return home to poverty and hunger, cheap opiates to dull the pain. My heart hurts so much.
Surrounded by her children, Karima, 30, smokes heroin and opium in her one-room home in the neighborhood of Shahre Kohneh, Kabul, Afghanistan.
The oldest is Fahima. At 12, she is the size of a child half her age. She has big brown eyes and bald spots on her head from malnutrition.
Fahima is the one her mother sends out to buy drugs to stoke her habit.
“My mom nags me to go get hashish and opium so she can be happy. If she doesn’t use it, she gets angry and hits us all,” Fahima says.
The soaring rates of drug abuse are driven in part by Afghanistan’s widespread unemployment and social upheaval under the Taliban and the U.S.-led war, begun in 2001. Another factor is the flood of returning Afghan refugees from Iran, many of whom became heroin addicts there.
The U.N.’s Jean-Luc Lemahieu calls it the “Coca-Cola effect.” The widespread abundance and affordability of the drugs have made them as ubiquitous and available as soft drinks.
“What people always forget is that not only demand creates supply, but supply creates demand,” said Lemahieu, the representative in Kabul for the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.
