Opium use in Afghanistan creating ‘silent tsunami’ of addicted women
KABUL, Afghanistan: One recent morning, three figures in white lab coats descended cautiously into a pitchblack netherworld beneath a crumbling bridge in the Afghan capital. They picked their way amid garbage and sprawled limbs, passing hundreds of huddled men whose gaunt, wary faces were briefly illuminated by the flare of matches and drug pipes.
The doctors were headed to a lone tent pitched nearby on the dry riverbed, where they knew a female addict named Marzia had been sleeping on her own. They approached quietly, saying they had come to help. From within came shouts of, “Go away, leave me alone!” Suddenly the young woman flung open the tent flap, cursing and hurling debris. Stumbling along the riverbed, she darted under the bridge and vanished into the protective company of fellow lost souls.
Drug addiction in Afghanistan, once mostly limited to men who spent years as labourers or war refugees in Iran, has exploded into a nationwide scourge that affects millions of people, including a growing number of women and children.
Over the past five years, programs of crop eradication and substitution have been largely abandoned as foreign funding has ended and insurgent attacks have increased. As a result, tens of thousands of farmers have returned to the lucrative business of growing opium poppies. Last year, 420,000 acres were devoted to poppies, and opium production rose 43 per cent over 2015, to 4,800 tons, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.
Most Afghan opium is sold for export to the heroin trade in Europe and Russia, with an estimated revenue value of nearly US$1 billion. But the boom has also led to a sharp drop in domestic drug prices, while widespread unemployment and anxiety created by years of war have fuelled demand for the cheap escape of drugs.
In 2010, UN experts estimated there were about one million regular drug users in Afghanistan, mostly using opium as “a kind of self-medication against the hardships of life.” They warned that addiction was “following the same hyperbolic growth of opium production.” By 2015, they reported, the number of addicts in the country had soared to three million – an astonishing 12 per cent of the populace – and more of them were using heroin.
Today the problem has burst into the open, overwhelming police and public health agencies. Dirt-streaked men can be seen passed out on almost any sidewalk in Kabul, and the few treatment centers are constantly full.
The most startling aspect of the drug boom, though, is still largely hidden from sight. Tens of thousands of Afghan women, confined to their homes by tradition and often dependent on addicted men, are succumbing, too. This has created a growing phenomenon of drug-centreed households where family relations, economic stability and social traditions can easily collapse.
“It is a silent tsunami, and if it is not controlled, in another few years it will be a disaster,” said Shaista Hakim, a physician and drug rehabilitation specialist who works at the recently opened National Centre for the Treatment of Addiction for Women and Children in Kabul.
During the Taliban era, when drugs were banned, “you could hardly find a woman using hashish, and even more rarely opium,” Hakim said. But in the past five years, she said, the number of female addicts has tripled. “Every woman here has problems like mountains, layer on top of layer,” she said. “They are so vulnerable, and their addiction involves the entire family, so we have to treat the entire family.”
According to experts, most Afghan female addicts are introduced to drugs by their husbands or other male relatives. Daily routines collapse, and traditional Muslim norms including women’s expected role as modest, devoted wives and mothers - are upended by the frenzy of hunting for drugs and the haze of getting high.
Some women become prostitutes or thieves. Children are given opium to keep them quiet, sent out to beg, turned over to orphanages or sold into marriage to pay for drugs. At their most desperate, younger women gravitate to drug markets such as the infamous addicts’ colony under the Pule Sukhta, or burned bridge, in southwest Kabul, where they can share a pipe, purchase a baggie of heroin for pennies and hide from the world.
“The addicted women feel safe there among the men, even though it’s dangerous and some abuse them,” said Hakim, who regularly visits the bridge area with her co-workers. “If they come with us, we can help them recover, but then they have to face the shame and gossip of being identified as an addict. For a woman in our society, that is worse.” — Washington Post