It is not going to be a big surprise that this youngest Afghan family member has fallen under drug spell with her grandfather, father, mother and a brother all addicted to opium. Except for one thing: Aria is just 15 months old. “All the time she is crying, so I give her just a little bit of opium to go to sleep,” said 30-year-old Suhaila, who goes by one name, cradling her daughter Aria in a squalid apartment block in eastern Kabul.Opium use among all age groups is on the rise in Afghanistan, which produces more of the drug than any other nation, according to the United Nations. But in a poor country where anti-narcotics efforts are focused on combating supply, not demand, there are few places to treat addicts who need help. “It’s a big problem here, there aren’t many places to go,” says Mohammad Stanekzai, program manager at the Nejat rehabilitation center in Kabul, the only aid agency in the capital established specifically to help addicts. “We have 130 people on the waiting list (for in-house care), but we’ve only got 10 beds.”
The government’s equivalent, the Drug Dependency Treatment Center, has just 20 beds adjoining a mental hospital. Afghan authorities — busy trying to rebuild a war-ruined nation and fending off attacks by insurgents — are trying to get a handle on how big the problem really is. The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime in Kabul is carrying out a study to determine the number of addicts in Kabul. The report has yet to be completed, but the UNODC deputy representative to Afghanistan, Adam C. Bouloukos, said one trend is clear. “We’re definitely seeing an increase in opium use — eating, smoking, injecting — particularly among refugees (in Pakistan and Iran) and returning refugees,” Bouloukos says.
“It’s understandable in the sense that you’ve got depressed populations. They’ve lost everything, they’re living in refugee camps with thousands of other people with no sanitation, no food, no water, bad conditions,” he said. Before returning to Afghanistan last year, Suhaila, too, was living with her family in a refugee camp near Peshawar in neighboring Pakistan. Conditions in Kabul are not much better. Suhaila lives in a ruined building that was never completed because of a 1990s civil war. Her husband has been an addict since birth and has smoked regularly for most of his adult life. When he married Suhaila, he offered her pieces of raw opium, a dark gooey substance, to cure minor ailments like coughs or headaches.
Opium has long been used as a traditional medicine
In Afghanistan, particularly in remote regions with little or no access to health care. It can also fight off the cold, even curb appetite. But it is also addictive. “I first ate it two or three times a week, whenever I felt bad,” Suhaila said. “But after two to three years, I it ate everyday.” While opium can kill if taken in excess, it rarely does. Economically, however, it can be devastating to people who are jobless, in need of food, and virtually broke. Stanekzai says addicts can spend as much as 50 Afghanis, or about $1, on the drug per day a day’s pay for civil servants and day laborers.
Another mother living beside Suhaila, 27-year-old Kamela, says her soldier husband funds his habit — he smokes as much as 20 times a day by endless borrowing. “All the time he’s thinking of opium. He’s not thinking of our family,” Kamela says. “He comes home and says he says he’ll buy opium first and then try to buy us bread,” Kamela says. Like many refugees, she relies on a tightly knit community of neighbors, including close relatives to ensure that nobody starves. A few months ago, nurses from Nejat arrived at Suhaila’s sprawling apartment complex and offered help. They gave medicine to her and her husband for free to beat back the craving for opium and ease the pain of withdrawal. A similar regimen will soon be administered to her daughter, but she has yet to stop feeding her the drug.
It’s unclear what affect opium can have on a so young a child, but Stanekzai says the drug could stunt mental development and growth, and make a child exceedingly lethargic. “Others know it’s harmful, but they just want to remove this trouble — a baby crying, disturbing their work — from the present.” Stanekzai said. “Some mothers just don’t know what affect it has on a baby.”