Read an Excerpt

From Chapter 13: Women and the Drug Trade in Afghanistan

Until the drug boom in the 1980s, addiction among Afghan women was limited to Turkmen women who weave carpets. Different surveys cite varying numbers on how many women are addicted, and they do not specify how many are women and how many are children. All the surveys agree that the number of women hooked on opium and heroin is consistently rising. Many of these women, like the men, are returning refugees from Iran and Pakistan. The husbands, brothers and other male relatives became addicts on the job—they smoked heroin to work more hours and make more money. But they ended up spending that money on more heroin and brought their habit home. Their children and women became users, and entire families in Afghanistan have become drug abusers. One family I visited in the historic neighborhood of Deh Afghanan in Kabul described how they became addicted in refugee camps in Pakistan. Mahbooba, a wife and mother of five children, lived in Peshawar for ten years. “My husband was in construction laying bricks all day long in Peshawar. He would come home tired and in pain. We had a neighbor in the camp who offered him some opium to ease his pain. He began smoking the opium in the house. Then the opium was not enough. So the neighbor offered him heroin. The heroin made him feel so energetic and good that he worked two days in a row and didn’t complain. But he needed more and more as time went by. My teeth were hurting and I decided to use opium as a painkiller too. Then day by day, I became interested in the heroin he was smoking. My teenage sons who were fruit vendors also began using the drugs. Instead of eating dinner, we smoked. When we moved back to Kabul after the Taliban left, we found new dealers. My husband works all day and we smoke the money, eating as much as we need to survive. I would like to quit but I think it’s too late.”

Mahbooba and her family returned to their bullet-riddled home and do not have to pay rent. Counselors at Nejat Center, one of 43 treatment centers in Afghanistan, say a large percentage of families at Deh Afghanan are addicts. The neighborhood was deserted during the civil war between the Mujahideen in the 1990s, and families repatriated only after 2001. The counselors make home visits and hand out methadone to addicts. They try therapy and various other methods of out-patient treatment with the women, but the number of addicts are more than the center has the capacity to serve. The impact of addiction unravels the basic unit that has given Afghans their resiliency to survive four decades of war: the family. Mahbooba says her relatives do not contribute to a collective family fund. Each working member spends money on their own addiction, and she begs once a week on the streets to find money for food. Mahbooba’s own addiction has damaged her role as the matriarch of the seven-member family. “My children do not respect me or listen to me. They judge me for becoming addicted. They say I should’ve stopped them and their father from being addicted. I wish I had but nothing’s stronger than heroin,” she said crying as she sits on a crumbling stairway outside her house. The addicts are the poppy trade’s most tragic consequence, their addiction an extremity of the human condition that, like war, is an abyss of hopelessness and death. They are the last link in the chain of the poppy trade which begins with a colorful flower, white, purple or red, spread across the fields of Afghanistan.