Riding the Devil in Afghanistan

"There's a lot of good people here. Engineers, doctors, educated people."

"But they have problems with drugs. The problem is getting worse, day by day."

Drug addict, Pul-e-Sukhta underpass, Kabul, Afghanistan

 

"I was a graduate from school and I prepared for college and loved a girl and I was unsuccessful. The family did not approve."

"After that, there was no chance for me, so I just used heroin to calm myself."

"When I came out [of Kabul's Ibn Sina rehabilitation hospital], what could I do? There was still no work."

"I have been to the hospital, but I became addicted again when I left."

Syed Ramin, 32, drug addict, Kabul

 

"By order of our supreme leader, Haibatullah, there has been a decision to reduce the problem."

"Nowadays there has come a reduction of our drug problem."

Abdul Nasir Munqad, Taliban leader appointee, hospital director

 

"Our problem is different to European countries, where people take drugs for pleasure. If we ask our patients, they have no jobs, they have no income."

"We started our religious classes because our country is a religious country and it has a good effect. It is our experience that we can root out this problem with religious classes." 

Dr. Atiq Azimi, secretary to the Ibn Sima rehabilitation hospital director

Drug addicts rounded up by the Taliban and forced to shave their heads brace for 45 days of withdrawal at the Avicenna Medical Hospital for Drug Treatment in Kabul. Many others have been sent to prisons that lack any drug treatment

Afghanistan is held to have one of the highest proportions of opium or opiate use within its population, in the world. In a nation of 39 million people, the country has an estimated 1.9 to 2.3 million regular drug users, according to a survey undertaken in 2015. The situation has become worse since then with the economic collapse that struck the country when international aid that supported many of Afghanistan's institutions disappeared with the return of the Taliban.

In one place along the outskirts of the capital Kabul, there are nearly a thousand drug addicts who shelter under a bridge in a western neighbourhood of the city. People stumble about, barely conscious of their surroundings, skeletal, disinterested in anything, focusing on drugs. To the curious onlooker many of those who exist within this area appear to be close to death. Yet among the living corpses, tradespeople selling tea move about.

Above the bridge underpass a regular stream of traffic moves, its noise barely noticed by those of the living dead below. All efforts to put a stop to the country's drug trade have failed. There is a burgeoning new trade in methamphetamine, exacerbating the situation where traditionally opiates ruled the market. Most of the addicts living under the bridge relate their stories of addiction to heroin or meth; some explain their addictions began as migrant workers in Iran.

Others speak of the dangers of grinding tours of the southern provinces while with the Afghan military, fighting the Taliban, which led them to drug use. When the Taliban resumed power in August of 2021 one of the initiatives it spoke of was to solve the country's addiction problem. They took to rounding up thousands of addicts off the streets, to force them into the Ibn Sina rehabilitation hospital.

Taliban fighters round up drug addicts in Kabul.

There are a thousand beds in the hospital and following the Taliban raids such crowding occurred as to see three patients in each of those beds. Overcrowding led to violence and conditions where little prospect of weaning addicts away from drugs seemed possible. Hospital doctors persuaded the Taliban to stop funneling addicts into the hospital. Many were taken to prisons instead. The hospital, now administered by a former prisoner of Bagram high-security prison, houses far fewer patients now.

Each of those patients undergoes a 45-day program to help with drug withdrawal where the firs 14 days are devoted to detoxification, followed by rehabilitation. Since enforced roundups were stopped almost all patients are 'voluntary'. Brought by their families to the hospital they cannot leave during treatment in a situation which houses them like inmates. Some of the patients try to escape their confinement. There are frequent clashes between patients and staff and violence occasionally breaks out.

"There are big differences between treating drug addicts in prisons and proper addiction-treatment centers. If patients think they are being forced to quit addiction...they will never accept treatment."
"No one can quit drugs if they are not ready to. The only way a drug addict can quit is to satisfy himself and prepare himself psychologically, which is not possible in prison." 

Salem Sadid, local psychologist, Farah, Afghanistan

"Definitely when there are economic hardships, when the population is displaced, they want to seek mechanisms to cope with their hardships."

"That definitely makes people vulnerable to more regular drug use."

Kamran Niaz, Office on Drugs and Crime, United Nations