対米全面テロ

Afghanistan Has Another Drug Problem: Addiction
Mon July 7, 2003 11:15 AM ET
By Mike Collett-White
KABUL (Reuters) - Tall and painfully thin, Homa sits in a tiny, windowless room in a Kabul hospital and tells the story of her heroin addiction.

Afraid of being disowned by her husband for talking to the press, she insists Reuters uses a false name to protect her identity and refuses to be filmed or photographed.

The 25-year-old has been smoking heroin for 10 years and wants to kick the habit for the sake of her three children.

She is one of thousands of Afghan drug addicts, who, in a country that dominates global output and trade in poppies, opium and their potent derivatives, are virtually ignored.

With the influx of 2 million refugees into Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001 the number of drug addicts has risen sharply, and worrying new trends, including the use of needles to inject heroin, are emerging.

"It is forcing the Afghans to wake up and acknowledge that drug use is a problem internally as well as externally," said Adam Bouloukos, deputy representative of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime in Afghanistan.

"They had a sort of head-in-the-sand approach that: 'Hey, we make these things here, we grow this poppy but it's all exported. The real problem is all those junkies on the streets of London'. But there is quite a lot of drug use here."

On a recent visit to Gardez, 69 miles south of Kabul, U.N. staff found many intravenous heroin users, a new development in a country where the drug is traditionally smoked through improvised pipes.

"That's kind of a first and is horribly dangerous, because with that (needle sharing) comes HIV and AIDS and all the other problems that this medical service here in this country cannot accommodate."