Showing posts with label opium. Show all posts
Showing posts with label opium. Show all posts

Apr 9, 2010

Afghanistan grapples with drug problem

Last year, President Obama reconsidered some of the assumptions of the counterinsurgency strategy but he forgot to reconsider fighting against drugs. He conceded the perilousness of Taliban and insurgency but he neglected to consider that Afghanistan has a silent and devastating enemy which is drug.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, until March 2008, about 1 million of Afghanistan's 34 million people were drug users, and the majority of these lived in the country's principal cities, based on UNODC estimation.


Map of Afghanistan showing major poppy fields and intensity of conflict 2007-08Today, with an estimation, two million Afghans struggling with drug addiction. Even different source offers that there are more than two million drug users in the country. Just in two years, the number of dug users doubled.

It is important for for the US and the world communities to reconsider the assumption of the counter-narcotic as a pivotal Afghan problem . Today, most of young Afghans don't have job and they suffering from different kinds of mental pressures. Needless to say, some of those youngsters join to Taliban.

The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime just announced that in 2010 Afghanistan is leading hashish producer. UN suggests that "it estimates that 10,000 to 24,000 hectares (24,700 to 59,300 acres) of cannabis are grown in Afghanistan every year and that this is used to make an estimated 1,500 to 3,500 tons of hashish annually." This is another double problem. Anyway, recently, I made a short interview with a website called "All Treatment." Read the interview on this link...

Apr 7, 2010

Drugs: Afghanistan's Silent Enemy

I just published a picture of an addict on my Photography website who I met in the abandoned Russian Cultural Center in Kabul. In the winter of 2008, I was assigned by UNAMA to picture the life of drug addicts in Kabul. I lived two streets away from the area where the addicts congregated during the cold winter. I passed by the wreckage of the building every day. One day, as I walked through the snow, mud and debris adjacent to the building, I found a dead body lying in the snow. Read more...