Heroin Addicts of Kabul
By Dheera Sujan, Radio Netherlands
Thorne Anderson is a
freelance photo journalist who has recently returned from a trip to Afghanistan
where, amongst other things, he documented the hidden murky world inhabited by
the ever increasing number of drug addicts in the country.
Afghanistan
was always a poppy growing country, but because of a Koranic loophole that
allows for the production but not the consumption of intoxicants, its opium was
largely for export. However the situation has changed in recent years. Afghans
are for the first time becoming serious consumers of their most deadly crop. In
the early years of the Taliban, poppy cultivation was all but stamped out.
However since the US-led invasion, it became one of their most reliable sources
of income, with the result that something like 12 percent of Afghans are now
involved in growing, processing or trading in the drug. And using it.
The United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime has just
published a report that says there are now more than half a million drug
addicts in the country. Kabul
alone has more than 60,000 heroin addicts, though the majority of them live in
rural areas. In the north of the country entire villages are addicted,
including the women and children.
Posters
The Afghan government has an ongoing campaign to raise
awareness of the harmfulness of the drug. For largely illiterate villagers,
they display posters showing a father sucking on a pipe and blowing the smoke
in his child's face - to illustrate the traditions that people must stop
following.
Thorne Anderson says there are three main factors
contributing to the alarming rise in heroin and opium use in Afghanistan:
decades of war and its accompanying trail of ruined families and communities,
the presence of facilities in the country for the first time for processing
opium into heroin, and the flood of returning refugees from neighboring Iran
and Pakistan. Both countries have serious drug addiction problems of their own.
"Most of the addicts I met there were these sweet simple villagers,"
says Thorne, "farmers who'd gone to Iran to look for work and came back
addicted."
Creepy
The addicts of Kabul
inhabit the countless hulls of buildings destroyed by years of bombardment.
"They're creepy places and there are figures skulking in corners, huddled
over fires, some of them near death… it's like seeing scenes from Dante's
Hell," says Thorne.
While photographing in these places, Thorne would ask the
addicts if there was a place they could go for treatment. They told him there
wasn't, but after doing some investigating of his own, he found the Nejat Center
in Kabul - with
its limited facilities, it can only treat some 40 patients a month. So they
have very strict rules about the people they accept into their program. It was
here that Thorne came across Zabihollah, a young ex-police officer who had been
a heroin addict for two years.
"At first the drug took me to the stars and the
skies," Zabihollah told Thorne, "but it's a terrible thing that
destroys families." Zabihollah's habit was costing him more than his
monthly policeman's income and he was desperate to stop it.
Rehab
Zabi, as Thorne refers to him, was to become Thorne's chief
subject. When the two met, the young Afghan had just completed the first month
at the Nejat Center rehabilitation center where he
was required to prove his good intent by reducing his intake gradually until at
the end of the month he was taking only a fraction of the amount of heroin he
was used to.
Then he entered the brutal detox program of the center. His
head was shaved as a sign that he was about to embark on a new life and then
with four other men, he was put in a room where he went through cold turkey.
Monitored by doctors and helped as much as possible by a
sympathetic staff, these men endured - and Thorne documented - the torments of
withdrawal: days of sleeplessness, inability to eat or drink, extreme
discomfort, and the night madnesses - with nothing stronger than paracetamol to
see them through it.
Close family to help
him
Afghanistan
has not nearly enough detox centers in the country to cater to its growing
population of addicts. And even the ones lucky enough to be accepted into
places like Nejat have a very high chance of relapse. But Thorne was optimistic
about Zabi's chances: "He has a very strong close family who are helping
him through this, and a very clear vision of the future."
Zabihollah's dream is to go back to his police job and to
specialize in treating drug addicts. Thorne witnessed many police beatings of
drug addicts, he was present when they were hunted out of their corners and
kicked on to the streets. Zabihollah wants to train his police colleagues to
handle drug addicts in a better way than they do now because as he continuously
repeated: "Mr. Thorne, drug addicts are not bad people; we are sick
people."