Rehabistan

TEXT BY JEREMY KELLY, PHOTOS BY TRAVIS BEARD

ogether with its NGO partners, the UNODC uses what it calls Demand Reduction Action Teams to help both those in remote regions and women, who in male-dominated Afghanistan cannot check in for treatment as easily.

In remote Badakhshan, the second-highest opium-producing province, the drug is used liberally in place of medicine, often with disastrous consequences. Recipients get a taste for it and before long they are hooked. Others seek to enhance their high by catching scorpions, killing and drying them, and then crushing them into a powder that is mixed with either heroin or opium. It’s said to produce hallucinogenic effects. Others use the heads of dead, dried snakes in place of scorpions.

In Herat province, close to the Iranian border, 4,000 patients are on the waiting list for one of 20 beds at the Shahamat clinic, funded by a German NGO called GTZ. The UNODC is seeking to find sustainable futures for many who have found drugs as a way to escape the seemingly endless chain of war and poverty. They provide classes for both women and men in tailoring, with some having successfully opened small businesses.



Afghan and Western efforts to curb production have been stymied by an insurgency (most ferocious in Helmand province, which on its own produces a quarter of the world’s heroin) and the government’s inability to stamp out corruption. Perhaps unsurprising when the president-appointed corruption-buster spent nearly four years in a Nevada prison for heroin trafficking and you can be offered hashish at a wedding from a Ministry of Counter Narcotics official you’ve just met. Meanwhile, the number of drug users continues to climb. “This is a battle in Afghanistan that will be won,” Public Health Minister Amin Fatimie says optimistically. But with a country almost wholly dependent on foreign aid, it will need help. Fatimie believes that the international community has realized the importance of the issue, but getting the message across to the people of Afghanistan, where illiteracy is as high as 90 percent in some districts, makes its prevention-before-cure policy somewhat tricky.

A recent initiative has been to print 20,000 antidrug booklets for mullahs to use during Friday prayers. On the streets, billboards portray the devil dancing around opium fields while government-produced matchboxes depict a smiling man among huge sunflowers with the reverse side showing the man cowering under giant poppy bulbs.

Fatimie’s immediate concern is intravenous drug use—a relatively new phenomenon in Afghanistan, arriving after the fall of the Taliban in late 2001.

Predictably, it has spawned a spike in HIV—69 registered cases, but the real figure could be as high as 2,500. The government-run Drug Demand Reduction Department now covers 17 of the country’s 34 provinces providing specialized help within hospitals, but the task of treating the problem is really the domain of the UN and non-governmental organizations. The public health minister says saving this new generation from the drug menace will not only help his people but also the world, since his country is the global wellspring of heroin. We’ll see if he succeeds in plugging it up.