FDS Insight Magazine Aug - Oct 2022

36 glass pipe of heroin. Smoking it gives him some energy. He says his name is Dawood. He lost a leg to a mine about a decade ago during the war, and couldn’t work after that. His life fell apart and he turned to drugs to escape. Drug addiction has long been a problem in Afghanistan, the world’s biggest producer of opium and heroin, and now a major source of meth. The drug use has been fuelled by persistent poverty and decades of war that have left few families unscarred. It appears to be getting worse since the collapse of the country’s economy after the seizure of power by the Taliban in August 2021, and the subsequent halt of international financing. Families once able to get by have found their livelihoods cut off, leaving many barely able to afford food. Millions have joined the ranks of the impoverished. Drug users can be found around Kabul, living in parks and sewage drains, under bridges and on open hillsides. Young men crouch on a staircase to smoke heroin alongside addicted and hungover dogs.(AP Photo: E. Noroozi) An Afghan woman smokes heroin on the edge of a hill in Kabul. (AP Photo: E. Noroozi) A 2015 survey by the United Nations estimated that up to 2.3 million people had used drugs that year, which would have amounted to about 5 per cent of the population at the time. Seven years later, the number is not known, but it’s believed to have only increased, according to Dr Zalmel, the head of the Drug Demand Reduction Department who, like many Afghans, uses only one name. The Taliban have launched an aggressive campaign to eradicate poppy cultivation. At the same time, they have inherited the ousted, internationally backed government’s policy of forcing drug users into camps. Taliban fighters look for drug addicts hiding in garbage to detain and move them to a drug treatment camp.(AP Photo: E. Noroozi)