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Afghanistan’s Forgotten Heroin Addicts

The illicit drug industry that is feeding the world’s addiction is taking a toll at home

LITTLE HELP Bismillah, 28, occupies one of the 50 beds at the Wadan Drug Rehabilitation Center in Kabul, Afghanistan. The struggling facility is one of the few places where the more than 60,000 heroin addicts in the country can find help.
Photo by Jason P. Howe

Bismillah is one of the lucky ones. Forced to flee his home because of fighting, his family abandoned him, and three of his four children died in infancy. But in a half-built concrete warehouse on the outskirts of Kabul, the 10-year heroin addict is finally getting help.

“I started smoking marijuana, then opium,” he says softly, gazing listlessly out of the window of the converted warehouse that serves as a drug treatment center.

“Under the Taliban there were heroin factories in my hometown, and we were turning opium into powdered heroin. We had no idea it was so dangerous.”

The 28-year-old refugee used to live in Helmand, a Taliban heartland in the war-ravaged south, where he split his time between running a small shop and tending his private opium crop.

“Our land was only very small, so unless we grew opium poppies we couldn’t eat,” he says. “I was growing opium and taking it to the factories, where we turned it into heroin.

Today, his wife and their one surviving daughter live in a tented refugee camp on the northern edge of Kabul, where winter temperatures plunge well below minus 20 degrees Celsius.

Bismillah is one of more than 2 million Afghan drug addicts, fed by cheap heroin in a country that produces more than 90% of the world’s supply. While billions of dollars have been spent trying to curb Afghanistan’s narcotics trade, far less has been provided to help the people inside the country whose lives it ruins.

There are only 50 beds at the Wadan Drug Rehabilitation Centre where Bismillah is being treated. In Kabul alone, drug-treatment advisors estimate that there are between 60,000 and 80,000 addicts and fewer than 300 beds at a handful of nongovernment clinics, which struggle to get funding.

HARD TALK Saeed Agul Stanikzai (left), director of the Kabul Wadan Drug Rehabilitation Centre, talks with a patient.
Photo by Jason P. Howe

Saeed Agul Stanikzai, the Wadan Centre’s director, says they are about to run out of money. “We got $100,000 for our first 4 months, but that’s about to run out. No one has agreed to pay more,” he says.

Meanwhile, the conditions that create addicts show no signs of letting up. Since 2001, Bismillah’s homeland has become one of the most bitterly contested battlefields in Afghanistan. A small foreign military force that was sent to his hometown of Musa Qala in 2006 was forced to retreat under a controversial ceasefire that eventually ceded control to the Taliban.

Foreign troops retook the town in late 2007, but the farmland outside is still well beyond government control. Opium is the crop of choice.

In the chaos of counterinsurgency, heroin production has exploded across Afghanistan, and while a few new provinces are declared poppy-free each year, production in the Taliban strongholds has been largely undented. The Taliban taxes farmers 10% of the farm-gate prices and provide protection to the opium convoys.

LIVES IN RUINS Dozens of heroin addicts have occupied a complex of buildings ruined during the civil war. Here they live with no furniture, cooking or washing facilities.
Photo by Jason P. Howe

ADDICTED Heroin users in Kabul smoke the drug through paper tubes after heating it on small pieces of foil.
Photo by Jason P. Howe

RECOVERING The Wadan Rehabilitation Center houses heroin and opium addicts, many of whom formerly lived rough in the ruins of the Russian Cultural Center.
Photo by Jason P. Howe

Increasingly, Afghanistan’s opium is manufactured into heroin inside the country before it is smuggled to Europe. Farm laborers, who harvest opium by scoring the poppy bulbs and scraping up the sap, often get addicted by licking their work knives. In rural parts of the country, opium is routinely used as a painkiller. In Badakhshan, in the northeast, some mothers feed babies opium to sedate them. Entire families are addicted.

But many addicts injecting heroin learned their habits abroad. “A lot of the addicts are Afghan refugees who have returned from Iran and Pakistan,” says Mr. Stanikzai. “But nearly all of them are young people. They are the future of Afghanistan, and we have to help them. When we treat an addict, we’re not just helping one person; we’re helping a whole family, sometimes a whole community.”

Mohammed Akbar, 36, was deported from Iran 3 years ago after living there for more than 20 years as a refugee. He was already addicted when he came back to a country he barely remembered, to a city he hardly knew.

“I had no family here; I had no friends,” he said. “I couldn’t find any work.” Eventually, he found his way to the bombed-out shell of the old Russian Cultural Centre, a favorite haunt for Kabul’s addicts.

Once a showpiece of Soviet occupation, the building was destroyed and abandoned in the bloody civil war that laid to waste more than 30% of the city.

Amid the squalor of the ruins lived 450 addicts in permanent gloom, surrounded by squalid trappings of addiction—needles, foil, and human filth—until they were evicted in a citywide cleanup.

Most of them moved to the ground floor of the Wadan Centre, where they are waiting for space in the rehabilitation program. Many of them have been waiting for months.

“I used to sell boiling water on the street,” Mr. Akbar says. “Whatever I earned I’d spend on heroin.”

The street price of heroin in Afghanistan is the lowest in the world, according to estimates. Addicts in Afghanistan pay less than $4 a gram, at least 25 times less than the equivalent price in Europe or the United States, by which stage the drug is cut and diluted an untold number of times.

At the Wadan Centre, addicts awaiting treatment are free to come and go, but they are frisked by police each time they return. Heroin is banned on site.

Just a few hundred meters away, under a bridge on the Kabul river, lone men shuffle along the muddy, rubbish-strewn banks, looking for a private place for their next deadly fix.

Despite the drug’s abundance, many addicts are still forced to steal. “Even my own family didn’t trust me,” Bismillah admits. “I was so addicted that I was taking things from my own home.”

And even when they complete the rehabilitation course, reintegration into society is a massive challenge. “Drug addiction in Afghanistan is very shameful for an addict’s family,” Mr. Stanikzai says.

At the Wadan Centre, the recovering addicts enjoy a range of treatments, including medication, basic literacy classes, and vocational training in drawing and painting. But even after completing the course, many cannot find work.

Naeem Mohammed Aleem, 23, has been clean for 5 months, but he’s still living on a mattress underneath the rehab center, with about 40 addicts for company.

“The real problem here is that everyone is unemployed,” he says. “Even once they get treated they can’t find work and so they get addicted all over again. I was treated 5 months ago, but I’m still sleeping here because I can’t find a job.”

Kabul has grown from a few hundred thousand people to more than 3 million since 2001, but opportunities for returnees are limited.

Many refugees in Iran and Pakistan are economic migrants, who flee Afghanistan not because of fighting but in search of work. For those who get sent back, it seems their last opportunity is gone—unless they find redemption at a treatment center.

“If you are a drug addict, people assume you are a thief,” said Khalid, a father of four recently deported from Iran. “I lost everything—money, respect, friends—and I made the decision to give up. I decided to get proper help. It’s my only chance of a better future.” •