An Afghan official demonstrates how opium can be cultivated from a poppy plant.
ABCNEWS.com
Opium Den
With Taliban Out, Brazen Drug Trade Flourishes in Impoverished Afghanistan
By Chris Bury
ABCNEWS.com
Dec. 13— The raw material for heroin is grown so openly and abundantly in Afghanistan that farmers and a local mayor were willing to show the United Nation's top anti-drug official exactly how their poppy plants are cultivated for opium.
In 20 years of turmoil during the Soviet era and civil war, opium became Afghanistan's cash crop of choice. The Taliban cracked down, curtailing production in many places. But in the two years since they have been driven from power, the poppy trade has come roaring back.
Antonio Costa, who heads the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime, knows Afghan farmers have no incentive to plant anything else — even though cultivating opium is nominally against the law. After all, the average annual income in Afghanistan is less than $400 a year, and poppy farmers typically earn 15 times that amount or more.
"The rewards for those cultivating opium or trafficking in opium can be extremely high," Costa said. "The risks, on the other hand, are very low. So far there has been no threat to those engaging in this activity."
Mission: Impossible
Curbing that cultivation may be an impossible mission. In a painstaking, year-long survey of the entire country, U.N. investigators have just concluded that opium is now being cultivated in 28 of Afghanistan's 32 provinces. The acreage under production is up 8 percent over last year.
Adam Bouloukos, who studies opium production for the United Nations in Kabul, says Afghan farmers are producing more poppy than at any time since the Soviet occupation.
"It's a massive economy, absolutely massive economy; it's the largest opium poppy producing country in the world," Bouloukos said. "You have a number of very poor people — massive, massive poverty in the country — and … millions of refugees returning to the country with no opportunities. They've lost their land, they've lost their families. They've lost maybe the wage earner, the father of the family."
Unlike other crops, opium can survive almost any wartime conditions, including Afghanistan's notoriously bad roads.
"There are no other means of getting around other than on these bad roads," Bouloukos said. "If you have a bushel full of bananas, you damn well better get it to market very soon, otherwise it's going to spoil. Opium doesn't spoil. So, you can take your time getting it to market. So, it's a good war product.
Afghan Addicts
In Afghanistan, opium has always been used as a homegrown medicine to stave off colds and hunger. But the dramatic increase in production has created a toxic byproduct: serious drug addiction, something the country has never really experienced before.
"There's a large increase in drug use — intravenous drug use, heroin use," Bouloukos said. "If there's heroin use, that means that somebody's making the heroin or they're bringing it, but probably it's being made here. … And that's a relatively new phenomenon."
Indeed, for the first time in its history, Afghanistan is opening clinics for drug addicts. Several men undergoing an Afghan version of group therapy said, at first, drug traffickers give heroin away just to get their customers hooked.
"In the beginning, they are distributing to the people without any charges," one of the men said. "When they understood that now they are addicted, then they tell them, please give us the money."
The government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai officially condemns opium production but lacks the power to do much about it.
"Drugs cannot be eradicated, contained and eliminated without investing in security," said Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan's finance minister.
Warlords Profit
Unfortunately, most of the countryside is still controlled by warlords who profit from the drug trade and use the money to pay and arm their own militias — some of the very same militias that helped the American military drive out the Taliban. In one of the poorest countries in the world, the lure of quick cash is enough to make police and government officials look the other way.
"The word that we've been using is not so much 'corruption' but 'involvement,' " Bouloukos said. "[The system] of getting dry opium from a remote village in Afghanistan that's only accessible by donkeys to the streets of London in the form of very strong heroin requires some trafficking system and agreements by people along the way to allow for the goods to be trafficked."
Bouloukos concedes it might be a polite way of saying, "bribes along the way."
The opium trade is now so huge and so corrosive that the United Nations says Afghanistan is in danger of becoming a failed state — that the power vacuum left by the collapse of the Taliban is being filled by drug cartels, and that the longer they hold on to power, the harder it will become for the new Afghan government to survive.
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