One Week With John Gulliver - Heroin battle in secret war
Published: 25 March, 2010
THE Afghanistan war is being waged in virtual secrecy.
I discovered a hidden side in a marvellous film premiered recently in Bloomsbury. Addicted in Afghanistan follows two boys weaned onto heroin at just eight years old. Since the invasion the drug has become Afghanistan’s staple industry, and the boys’ families and neighbours are addicted too.
Film-maker Jawed Taiman, a reporter for Voice of America radio, reckons there are more than one million addicts in Afghanistan – and around 40 per cent are women and children. In a country where more than half are jobless, homeless and without water, $1 can buy a packet of heroin on any street corner. It’s not just entire families that are hooked but whole neighbourhoods.
“These pictures of poppy fields being destroyed are fake,” said Taiman. “The farmers have one field for show, which is destroyed for the cameras, and several others behind it still growing poppies.”
Private hospitals in the capital Kabul provide cold-turkey treatment, if you’re lucky enough to have $300 cash. After 10 drug-free days addicts are back on the streets to fend for themselves.
The two boys who brave the drug treatment tragically wind up back on drugs.
This scourge was unheard of until we helped the Taliban to power in the 1980s. Ironically, it’s now the Russian Cultural House, a legacy of the pre-Taliban secular government, that’s Kabul’s main drug-den. I asked Taiman about life under the Soviet-backed government. “You could count on one hand the number of addicts,” he said.
Another twist closer to home: Whitehall reckons 95 per cent of heroin in London – including that sold in Camden – comes from Afghanistan.