Afghan addiction

20,000 feet down, the Hindu Kush mountains floated by, distant, desolate, ethereal.... and I remembered the books I had read during my summer holidays, curled up, lost, mother calling for dinner…ignored.

In 1857 a long British caravan straggled across the same mountains. Most were massacred, picked off by tribesmen with long barreled jezails. Betrayed and crushed, the British empire had been brought to its knees.

A lone bloodied doctor survived... and had stumbled into India.

The view would be amazing I had read online. I flew into the Islamic republic of Afghanistan on the IC Delhi Kabul flight, over the Hindu Kush ...down the rabbit hole. I was headed to Afghanistan to help a friend shoot a film on the poppy trade.

”It means Hindu killer...hindu kush” said the tiny man seated next to me as he leaned over to read the file I read. He had a pooja mark on his forehead and cleaned the food off his tray with much open mouthed chewing. He kept the sugar sachet in his pocket for later.

"hindu killer" mountains

NGO workers, contractors, loud americans who chatted in groups, smelling of deodorant, gelled.
World bank employees, reconstruction, mines, IEDS...the words floated across the plane aisle to my ears. Groups had formed and people seemed keen to be friendly, to bond and coalesce as we cruised over bare mountains sipping coke and looking down at the starkness below.

Stark mountains and starker people. Romantic. Unforgiving. Dangerous. Beautiful. a black hole, a place of death and fear, war, warlords and Rambo, women being stoned, Islamic fundamentalism and Osama bin laden scuttling about the shadows.

This was the Afghanistan that existed in my head. A monster, imaginary.

Thus I flew, thus i descended, and the nervous brahmin tore open his sugar sachet and poured the contents down his throat.

"For ear blockage" he said.

We had hired security contractors', a polite terminology for mercenarys' to look after us while we were in Afghanistan. I was picked up at the airport in Kabul by Brian who walked into the immigration line, rifle on shoulder. "You...national Geographic?" and taken to a land cruiser parked out side the wrecked airport sans baggage which would be picked up later by an aide.

"Right", said Brian…. "wear this", and gave me a gradel level 3 flak jacket, and "if anything happens listen to us, get down and get out of the vehicle on the side we are not being fired on only when and if we do. Okay?

Ok.

We drove thorough Kabul, fast, down the Jalalabad road and through crowds of vehicle, going off road when possible and racing ahead of traffic. Brian watched out the window, sig rifle on his lap. Later I found out that an informant had reported in a suicide bomber who had been looking for a target .He had been wandering about at about the same time we raced towards the contractor compound.

The city looked stricken…. Bombed out buildings, bullet holes. Kabul is over 3,000 years old. and many have fought over the city due to its strategic location between Europe, the middle East and Asia. More than 20 years of war have scarred the city.

We drove to the “compound” where the contractors lived at high speed.

Q"Why do you drive so fast?"

A "Suicide bombers mate"

Some afghans, especially the ones we almost ran over, cursed us as we zipped by.

FAK YOU!

Other people waved and smiled.....

But most seemed....

The armor group compound was located in a secure part of the city and we traversed several checkpoints with tiny Nepali gurkhas wielding seemingly oversized Ak-47s . Gurkhas seemed to always be the sentries. The compound gates were opened and the armored land cruisers were checked for bombs before being let through. Manicured lawns, wire fencing, bar, air conditioning, buffet, sterile.

Approximately 50 percent of Afghanistan’s GNP comes from the drug trade. Afghanistan is the world's largest source of illegal heroin and has a long history of opium cultivation. The Taliban cracked down on the trade and almost eradicated the same. After the Taliban regime was overthrown by the US-backed Northern Alliance in 2001 opium production resumed. This year, it’s been the biggest harvest ever and according to the Americans the Taliban fund their war with profits from the same. Eradication efforts drive angry farmers into the arms of the Taliban who levy a tax and protect the farmers from government troops.

The Americans have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a huge effort to stop heroin cultivation. Helmand Province, the center of the Taliban resurgence and temporary home to a huge number of British and American troops, produces more opium than any other country in the world.

We were to film the destruction of fields by afghan troops. It will be dangerous we were told as often the villagers would fight the troops and sometimes the local taliban would pitch in. Many had been killed already.

But first we visited the Nejat treatment center. The only treatment center for heroin addicts in Kabul. Located on a side street close to a rubbish dump the Nejat treatment center looked after a few addicts.

I took the following images there during filming. The men would have group therapy outdoors where they would recount their experiences with the drug. The stories were similar...unemployment, boredom, no education. 99 percent of Afghanistan is illiterate. Lives with very little hope and no ambition. Like the stark mountains I had flown over they had very little except for their history of violence, war, fundamentalism and exploitation. They were very much a part of the landscape.

A 2006 United Nations report estimates that the total number of drug users in Afghanistan is nearly 1 million - almost 4% of the total population.

Afghanistan is suffering from a huge rise in heroin addiction. The easy and cheap access to the drug has found many users in an unemployed and ill educated country suffering the ravages of 30 years of war, grinding poverty and unemployment.

addict

After the American and NATO takeover of Kabul in 2001 and the resumption of heroin cultivation on a huge scale, the number of heroin addicts doubled between 2003 and 2005. It is believed that a lot of the addiction began in refugee camps where boredom, frustration and loss rules the day.

Addict

About 60,000 children are addicted to narcotics in Afghanistan, the World Drug Report has said. Female addicts find it very difficult to access treatment. The UN report says there are about 100,000 female addicts in Afghanistan. It is believed that the real figure is much higher.

Many men do not permit their female family members to seek drug addiction treatment. In war stricken areas treatment is impossible.

The country is one of the worlds poorest.

The damage drug addiction is doing to Afghan families and society is very real. No real statistics exist due to tribal leaders being embarrassed to disclose figures as in the past drug addiction was criminalized under the Taliban. The social stigma remains.

I watched a group of men teased, laughed and joked their way through the sessions. The moderator seemed warm and kind and occasionally many of the men would laugh.

They played musical instruments and a few danced Tajik style, moving in a circle.

One young man refused to dance and sulked in a corner.

It looked like a Bangalore neighborhood AA meeting. All the characters were present. The loudmouth, the quiet one, the sulker...

And except for the location, it was.

We visited with two heroin addicts. One brought his little daughter along.They were quiet men, soft spoken and skinny. Their families had been wrecked by the drug and all they lived for as they said, was for their next fix. They took us to an abandoned building some distance out of Kabul. The structure was bombed out, bullet hole marked and littered with human feces.The little girl waited and they smoked up with raw unprocessed heroin. They were methodical and practised. The inhaled deeply and one used a pen minus the refill to inhale the fumes from the burning chunk of heroin. We filmed away, the men crouched in a corner and thick clouds of the drug wafted by. After awhile I felt dizzy and nauseous but it was soon replaced with a feeling of euphoria and joy.

We finished shooting and I stood outside the building, high on heroin for the first time.
So this is Afghanistan, my version, I thought to myself. The mountains looked beautiful.
I was beautiful.

I wondered what would become of the beautiful child at my feet. No education, no parental guidance, no jobs, no future, no hope. No Rabbit hole this. No wonderland.

"Maybe she will be sold," said Brian when I asked him."Heroin can make people do awful things," It was true in some ways. The anecdotal Afghanistan of my head, but not as romantic.

Brian and the girl

The little girl found me and my Nikon quite funny. My "Afghan girl,"I thought to myself minus the perfect lighting. Brian gave her bar of chocolate. We left her with her father and drove back to Kabul. As we left the little girl made scary faces and stuck her hands out in front of herself to make like monster claws. She growled and roared.

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Next post

We were headed into the fields of Nangahar province. The trip entailed a drive through the mountains into East Afghanistan. Several hours on a narrow road with huge drops and gorges. The taliban had conducted several raids and attacks on this road in the recent past.The area were were to visit had seen a lot of violence and soldiers had been killed.

"Potentially very dangerous, this here field trip" muttered Brian, who seemed nervous.

I was too.

to be continued......