Tackling Heroin Use in Afghan South

Tall and black-bearded, Mohammad Hashem still has a youthful look that belies the trouble he is in. 

When IWPR’s correspondent in the southern Afghan province of Zabul found him, he was sprawled in a heap of trash, barely able to open his eyes.

“Give me money or food; I’m hungry,” he said.

Hashem said he first got involved in opium and heroin when he travelled to Iran in search of work some years ago, and found himself sharing a room with drug users.

He ended the interview by saying, “Take me to hospital. I want to get well.”

Doctors in Zabul province report rising addiction rates for opium and its derivative heroin. Local officials say a specialised treatment centre is desperately needed, and there are now firm promises that such a clinic will be built.

Others argue that the underlying problem is poverty, which needs to be addressed before drug consumption will start falling.

"I have no farmland, no skills, no money and no job,” heroin user Ismail told IWPR. “First I smoked hashish, and then someone gave me this powder, so that I would longer aware of the world once I’d smoked it. It looked like a way to rid myself of m sorrows. Now I want to quit, but there’s no one to help me."

"The only thing that bothers me is that everyone hates me," explaining that his family despised him and would not let him come home.

The director of public health in Zabul, Dr Lal Mohammad Tokhi, says the number of drug addicts is increasing on a daily basis.

“Many of the people admitted [to hospital] are on heroin. We help them as much as we can, but we can’t do more, as we don’t have a specialised hospital or clinic for addicts,” Tokhi said.

Tokhi said the central health ministry in Kabul had agreed in principle to build a treatment hospital.

At the provincial counter-narcotics department, the head of public outreach, Zabihullah, said Kabul was promising that the clinic would be built within the current Afghan year, ending in March 2014.

Zabihullah admitted that the counter-narcotics department started operating so recently that it had not gathered statistics on drug use. “All I can say is that the number of addicts is increasing,” he said.

Nationwide, figures from the Afghan counter-narcotics ministry and United Nations agencies suggest that some 960,000 Afghans are dependent on drugs.

Zabihullah described how the major trafficking networks, whose main business is shipping heroin abroad, also sell it within Zabul, which lies close to the border with Pakistan.

“Unless unemployment and poppy cultivation are eliminated, it’s going to be impossible to halt drug addiction. The problem is increasing day by day,” he said.

Provincial police chief Gholam Sakhi Rogh Lewanai said his officers had taken effective action to curb local distribution as well as cross-border trafficking. The small-time dealers were themselves in desperate situations, he added.

Ibrahim Azhar, deputy counter-narcotics minister at national level, believes that providing a treatment centre is not enough.

“It’s true there’s a need to build a clinic, and we have decided to set one up for addicts in Zabul, but we don’t see it as a fundamental solution,” he said. “it’s going to be impossible to curb addiction rates unless poverty and unemployment are reduced, people are given jobs and [have no need] to travel to other countries for work; and unless tensions within families are addressed, and the imams of mosques offer help.

An Islamic scholar in Zabul, Mohammad Ayub, agreed that clerics could do more to encourage users to stop.

"In Islam, any intoxicating item is considered unlawful and offenders should be punished,” he said. “But it the duty of religious scholars to work with people and make them understand how harmful this [drug use] is, in this world and the next.”

Niaz Mohammad Ziarmal and Abdol Qayum Ajez are IWPR trainees in Zabul. Additional material contributed by Mina Habib in Kabul.