Mar
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What does Opium mean to them in Afghanistan
March 9, 2008 | | Leave a Comment
By Violet Wang
What Afghanistan doesn’t have, to name a few, include a functional government, health care service, schooling, and jobs for young men. What Afghanistan does have, already notorious in the world, is opium. When people in the country use opium as an alternative to all those
they don’t have, the country suffered,
Good news did come out for the opium problem in Afghanistan is a UNODC (The UN Office on Drugs and Crime) preliminary survey in February indicated that overall opium poppy cultivation was likely to decrease slightly in 2008.
However, 22 of the country’s 34 provinces will still produce over 90 percent of the world’s illicit drugs, UNODC said.
Being the world’s leading producer of opium, and a country deep down into poverty and lack of medicine, opium, with some medical function, become the cheapest way for villagers in the country to cure disease. Most of the time, they are unaware of the harm caused by the usage of
opium.
A recent IRIN report [http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=77014] shows how villagers in remote areas of Badakhshan Province, north-eastern Afghanistan, have been using opium as a substitute for medicine for years.
UNODC says one million people are addicted to drugs in the Badakhshan Province, 45,000 of whom are women.
In the IRIN video report, while efforts are being made to rehabilitate drug addicts in the village, Bibi Mulla, a local villager, her relatives and friends smoke opium at home and give it to their children up to three times a day, believing the drug can cure illness.
IRIN (Integrated Regional Information Networks) is part of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, but its services are editorially independent.
In the other side of the country, the southern Helmand Province. Wadan Rehabilitation Centre (WRC) – a drug addiction treatment and counseling facility in southern Afghanistan, inhabits many teenagers who had picked up opium in adjacent fields after they had nothing to do after school closed and no entertainment around.
Another IRIN report in September last year described who happened to a 16 year old kid in the Helmand province, who got addicted to the drug by swallowing opium from his father’s opium field. His father later sold out all his opium stock after he found his son was addicted to the lethal plant.
Provincial health officials estimate there are 65,000-70,000 drug abusers in Helmand Province, most of them young men, cited the IRIN report.
Drug abusing has become one of the most important issues when looking into the issue of how Afghanistan people are thinking of this lucrative yet deadly plants.
