In the fourth part of their series MARY FITZGERALDreports on, and BRENDA FITZSIMONSphotographs, the heroin addicts of Kabul
LIKE GHOSTS they move in and out of the shadows, shrunken, emaciated figures with stooped shoulders and dead eyes.
Shuffling and stumbling their way through rubble splashed with excrement and vomit, they pass under a crumbling mural of Lenin illuminated by shafts of sunlight that fall through the collapsed roof.
In one corner Hamid, a former soldier, staggers away with pinhead eyes after taking one of his first hits of the day. He has been using heroin for 23 of his 45 years. A dirty jacket hangs open over his bare concave chest, revealing a tattoo of a coiled cobra along with the names of two friends, now dead. “Without you life means nothing”, it reads in Pashtu.
Nearby, a young Afghan with a faded gash across his cheek pulls the skin of a fellow addict taut as he injects him in the leg, while another man with glazed eyes leans back in a stupor. Others sit with their heads in their hands, rocking back and forth.
These are the denizens of what was once one of the most impressive buildings in Kabul, known then and now as the Russian Cultural Centre.
Kabulis remember when the sprawling, modernist complex hosted recitals and opera performances, and showed films celebrating Mother Russia. During the years of civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 the centre was pummelled by shells and mortars as the surrounding city tore itself apart.
Today the abandoned warren of bullet-pocked walls, dank rooms and ruined stairways is home to more than 600 destitute Afghans who have fallen prey to their country’s biggest export – opium.
One man, also called Hamid, clutches a pink towel to his face against the stench that rises from the gloom, a mix of human waste and the distinctive stale odour of heated heroin. Earlier that morning he watched a friend die amidst the filth and decay.
Hamid is 22 and lives in another part of Kabul with his wife and baby. His face, smooth and handsome, and his clean clothes, contrast with the wild and desperate appearance of those who slump around him, but Hamid too is an addict. He, along with thousands of others, comes here every day to feed a habit he began three years ago.
“I wanted to get treatment,” Hamid explains almost apologetically. “But when I went to the hospital they told me they had no room for me. There were already too many like me.”
Those who run the handful of drug treatment clinics in Kabul say their limited facilities are overwhelmed by the scale of addiction in the city and its environs. They talk of waiting lists that stretch into thousands. They talk of Afghanistan’s drug problem finally coming home to roost, with devastating consequences.
The opium grown in vast poppy fields across Afghanistan was once smuggled abroad for refining before it appeared as heroin on the streets of Europe and the US.
In recent years, however, Afghan drug barons have begun processing the raw opium in country to achieve greater profit margins.
They have also discovered a ready domestic market in the legions of returned refugees who became addicted to heroin and opium while living in exile in neighbouring Iran and Pakistan.
A United Nations survey carried out four years ago calculated that despite the stigma attached to drug use in this deeply conservative country, addiction rates in Afghanistan have risen sharply since 2003, with an estimated 200,000 opium and heroin addicts in an overall population of around 33 million.
Tens of thousands of Afghan women and children use drugs, although this aspect of the problem remains for the most part behind closed doors due to the segregated nature of Afghan society.
Afghanistan produces more than 90 per cent of the world’s opium and profits from narcotics are estimated to make up more than half of the country’s gross domestic product. Bumper harvests in recent years have driven down the price of heroin sold on the streets of Kabul – one hit now costs around 50 afghanis, or $1.
Last year’s opium crop, despite falling slightly due to efforts to persuade farmers to switch to alternatives, proved the second biggest on record, according to the UN’s International Narcotics Control Board (INCB).
While the area under cultivation was reduced by a fifth, better yields meant opium production dropped only 6 per cent to 7,700 tonnes, after a record 8,200 tonnes in 2007, the agency said in its annual report.
It noted, however, that a further five of the country’s 34 provinces had ended opium production last year, bringing the total number of “opium-free” provinces to 18.
Most of Afghanistan’s opium is now farmed in the southern provinces where Nato-led troops are locked in a stalemate with an increasingly assertive Taliban. Its production powers the insurgency to the tune of $200-300 million each year, the UN says, sums gathered from taxes levied on opium farmers by the Taliban.
“Insecurity and drug production and trafficking . . . are very much inter-related,” INCB president Hamid Ghodse said earlier this year. “It is very difficult to say which is the cause and which is the effect.”
Aside from poor security, rampant corruption is one of the biggest obstacles in the battle against Afghanistan’s drugs trade, the INCB report notes. It accuses Afghan officials of allowing drug traffickers operate with impunity, and says those who do try to tackle the problem risk their lives. Last year, 78 officials working to eradicate opium crops were killed, six times the number in 2007.
“Corruption among officials at almost every level of the government is a major factor of the drug problem,” Ghodse adds.
When asked about their journey to addiction, many of those living in the shell of the Russian Cultural Centre tell similar stories to that of Abdulrahim Rahman. He first tried heroin nine years ago after fleeing Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to work in Iran.
“I had never heard of heroin before, but I saw people using it there and I wanted to try it for myself,” he recalls.
Abdulrahim, though still an addict, works for international aid agency Medecins du Monde, combing the ruins of the cultural centre daily for discarded syringes. “I collect between 100 and 150 syringes every day,” he says, his gloved hands holding a yellow plastic bucket full of bloodied needles. “And I see many who are close to death.”
The crowded and squalid conditions – dozens of men huddle together in fetid rooms, and many share needles – mean the spectre of Aids and other diseases such as hepatitis is never far away. International agencies estimate the number of HIV cases in Afghanistan runs to thousands. One addict says at least two people die at the centre every day, but the cause of death is rarely ascertained.
Close to the entrance, a tall man with matted hair and unkempt beard emerges from behind a ragged curtain pinned over a doorway. His name is Khan Agha and this has been his home for three years.
He began taking heroin 10 years ago. “You see my life,” he asks plaintively, gesturing around him. “This is not a life. We are outside everything. No one accepts us, not our families, not this society. We are better off dead.”
This series was supported with a grant from the Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund run by Irish Aid