REHABISTAN - PART 4Queuing for Recovery at Heroin's Ground ZeroPublished September, 2007
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.
TO BE CONTINUED:
REHABISTAN | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
See all articles by this contributor Anonymous, on Dec 14, 2009 wrote:
opiates were in many of our cough sepressants and medicines in the west until the 1920s-40s
it was only banned because of the American war on drugs, not because your better parents or such shit; opium has proven medical benefits.
don’t knock peoples habits without knowing your own history first. | | Anonymous, on Nov 11, 2009 wrote:
you never see trees or grass in these hellhole | | Anonymous, on Sep 1, 2009 wrote:
no wonder they are so fucking pissed at us and want to Jihad our asses | | Anonymous, on Aug 10, 2009 wrote:
there is a 12 step fellowship that is worldwide | | Anonymous, on Aug 10, 2009 wrote:
potato needs to be mashed. Wah wah wah like the world isn’t a bad place because of bad people,like most of you.Don’t worry eugenics is coming your way,so you wont have to look and think about things too much longer. | |
| potato, on Aug 8, 2009 wrote:
Crunk city
God rest your soul,’cos i fucking wont ! | | |
| potato, on Aug 8, 2009 wrote:
About methadone,right on !
i left a smack habit for a
physeptone (methadone) habit,
so so hard to come off !.
Went to prison & got off.
(really not as easy as i write !)
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| potato, on Aug 8, 2009 wrote:
The Russian army (when it left)took
thousands of heroin addicts with
it.I believe that it was the begining
of the ’russian mafia’.
once the ready supply of poppy based
drugs was denied to them they used
the infrastructure of the military to
import & distribute & sell heroin !.
History !!!!. | |
| komodo, on Aug 7, 2009 wrote:
damn. shotgunning for kids. that’s so fucked up i never would have thought it existed. i guess the daughter already got hers. it would be one way to do things when you couldn’t get a babysitter at a moment’s notice. | |
| DoubleJ, on Aug 7, 2009 wrote:
this does not surprise me. | | Anonymous, on Aug 7, 2009 wrote:
about methadone, it is more addictive, the shit gets in your bones and takes a month to kick, it is like trying to cure whiskey addiction with vodka, methadone is shit, avoid avoid. | | Anonymous, on Nov 11, 2008 wrote:
heroin all the cool kids are doing it. | | |
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