Opium flood overwhelms Afghanistan

He kept his mouth shut and was rewarded with two years in jail while his cargo carried safely on to the streets of Europe.

On this occasion, though, its addictive curse was not for export only. It waited outside the jail and followed him home. "During the smuggling trips over the mountains I started smoking the heroin to help me with the long walks," he said. "After I came back to Afghanistan from prison I carried on using it and got addicted. I thought it would be easy to give up. It’s not."

Baluch, 32, tells his tale from within the 15-foot high mud walls of a prison-like compound in the western Afghan city of Herat, near the Iranian border, that is the staging post for the multi-billion-dollar heroin trade.

Patrolled round the clock by Kalashnikov-wielding guards, it is one of only two full-time drug addiction centres in the country, offering a crude programme of medical treatment and gun-enforced abstinence that Baluch entered of his own accord.

Occasionally, one of the 250 shaven-headed addict-inmates is caught by the guards trying to escape, unable to face three months without a hit. Those who complete the course successfully are just a tiny fraction of the escalating numbers of Afghan heroin users in desperate need of treatment.

While vast amounts of Western money has been spent stemming Afghanistan’s massive heroin export trade, the fragile nation is facing widespread domestic addiction largely unaided. A new UN report this week will name Afghanistan as the world’s leading producer of narcotics, ousting Columbia.

Under the Taliban, who imposed a hardline Islamic rule after taking over most of Afghanistan in 1996, the cultivation of opium poppies was largely eliminated. Since the fall of the regime in 2001 to the US-led coalition, however, opium production has risen dramatically in lawless provinces, bringing in $2.3bn, more than half of the nation’s gross domestic product, last year alone. Afghanistan supplies more than 90% of the heroin that reaches Britain.

With some estimates putting addiction levels at anything up to one million - one in 25 of the population - Afghanistan’s fledgling new government is finally waking up to its massive home-grown smack habit.

Few countries could be deemed more vulnerable. A processed hit from the poppy plants that grow wild by the road sides costs less than $1 - easily within the reach of the poorest peasant and perfect for blotting out the miseries of 25 years of war and poverty.

With near total ignorance of its addictive effects, and little health or education infrastructure to teach otherwise, it is no surprise that the number of ‘poderi’ - addicts - is rocketing .

Dr Tariq Suliman, deputy director of the Nejat clinic in Kabul, which has just ten beds for full-time treatment, said: "The problem gets worse every day. We used to have hardly anybody addicted - but in the last three years that has risen to about 62,000 in Kabul alone. We desperately need more clinics for treating people and educating them about the dangers. In most provinces right now there is nothing at all."

Afghanistan has been world-famous for its opium and hashish ever since its days as a hippy paradise in the 1970s, but until recently drug use among locals was largely just as a substitute painkiller.

Problems began during the Taliban regime when large sections of the population fled to neighbouring Iran and Pakistan, both of which are already home to more than one million addicts each.

Rootless, jobless and often depressed, Afghans young and old found a warm welcome in Tehran and Peshawar’s many opium dens. They then took the habit into the vast and wretched refugee camps on the borders, where in some cases entire families became addicted.

The result is young boys like Naimat Ullah, who checked into the Herat clinic a month ago at the tender age of 13. Even now, his eyes are still glazed and his speech faltering.

"My family were refugees on the Iranian border, and both my father and my mother started using opium," he said. "I used to threaten to beat my mother to get her to stop it, but she just kept on and it affected her very badly. Eventually I too was using it twice a day."

While Afghan addicts traditionally smoked raw opium, around one in ten now use heroin instead, thanks partly to the growing number of locally based factories refining the product for export.

Those who inject, like 45-year-old Safir Mahmat, are also the most likely to turn to crime. "I have used for 35 years," he said, the veins on his legs hardened into rope-like thickness by constant needlework.

"I sold everything I ever had, smuggled, and eventually got six months in jail for mugging someone. I don’t even enjoy the effect anymore. I just want to give up."

Britain, which leads the international effort to stamp out poppy production, has pledged 70m to official efforts and part funds places like the Nejat clinic. The real challenge, though, is to change attitudes.

In the tight-knit, deeply conservative rural communities that make up 80% of the Afghan population, even talking about drug abuse - never mind admitting it - can be difficult.

A nationwide poster campaign is under way, some of it aimed at pricking the consciences of Afghanistan’s poppy farmers, for whom a crop of opium can earn $15,000 a year.

In one, a mother cries at a graveside while a neighbour points accusingly at a poppy field nearby. "The one who killed your son is in the field," he says.

But most experts believe the country’s drug problem is likely to get a lot worse before it gets better. In Afghanistan, as in many other places, drugs like heroin fill the yawning gaps created by a near-total lack of jobs, fulfilment and opportunity.