-spaceman-
Badass junkie
Heroin for breakfast
DATELINE KABUL: PART 2 OF OUR COMPELLING SERIES EXCLUSIVE She's 11, he's 14. They're among 60,000 child drug addicts in Afghanistan .. so much for the West's boast we'd raze the poppy fields
Kate Mansey In Kabul, Afghanistan [email protected] 07/10/2007
It is early morning in Kabul and two scrawny children sit hunched together on the mud floor of their shack, waiting for their mother to serve breakfast.
But here in the slums of the Afghan capital there is no choice of cereals or toast and marmalade.
There is only heroin.
Using hollow radio antennas as makeshift pipes, 11-year-old Golpari and her brother Zaher, 14, inhale the melted brown liquid from the bowl in front of them. Sitting in a corner their widowed mother Sabera inhales and also floats off into oblivion.
"Smoking heroin is no big thing," says Golpari, who started when she was eight. "I was used to seeing my mum smoking heroin. I'd breathe in the smoke and it used to make me feel light-headed.
"The first time I had it I had pains in my legs. We didn't have medicine and my mother and other people told me it would make me feel better.
"When I inhaled it I started to feel good. You don't feel any pain when you are high until it wears off, so then you have to smoke more. At first I was smoking just a little, but each day I needed more.
When it was too late I realised I was addicted and it was all I cared about. Nobody told me it was bad."
As soon as the heroin wears off, Golpari, who can't read or write and barely eats, starts worrying how she will get the 50p she needs for her next hit.
Wearing her one ragged dress she "works" as a pickpocket in the bazaars of Kabul while her mother sits in a burqa begging at the roadside.
Golpari is just one of more than 60,000 children addicted to heroin in Afghanistan - victims of this year's record opium crop and a telling indictment of Britain's pledge to destroy the Taliban's poppy fields. In fact, the street price has plunged by roughly half since 2001.
Frighteningly, there are now nearly one million addicts in Afghanistan - three per cent of the population. More and more are women, who blow opium smoke into their babies' faces to stop them crying from hunger.
Golpari and her family have a familiar story in a country which has suffered two decades of war.
Sabera was married off by her father at 13 to a man aged 35. Her husband handed her a Kalashnikov and she was told to fight in the war on the Russians.
When her husband died of a heart attack, Sabera had to rely on his family for help and a male cousin told her to try opium when she had a sore leg.
"I was living in Herat and as a lot of people had farms, opium and heroin were always available while medicine was not," says Sabera, who has no official birth certificate but thinks she is "about 45".
"I started smoking opium and moved on to heroin because the effects were better. When I look at my children smoking heroin my heart breaks and I wonder about their future, but I don't know how to stop them because I can't stop myself." When they aren't on the streets scavenging for their next fix, the family stay in a squalid hut owned by a drug-dealer. There is no sanitation, and sewage and blood from a slaughtered sheep flows between the tenements of the shanty town in the Kotisangi district.
Children as young as four look after babies and to fetch water from a well because parents and older brothers and sisters are too high. Golpari says: "It is easy to buy heroin in Kabul. A lot of shops sell it under the counter and I can buy some in five minutes. My ambition is to quit drugs and go to school like other little girls. I want to be a doctor to warn people about heroin."
Her brother Zaher adds: "I have tried to give up a few times but I always go back to it. I say I will give up next week but when the time comes I say, 'OK, next week I will definitely give up'." Despite tough talk from world leaders, the heroin trade is booming. The opium crop has more than doubled in the past two years, particularly in the Taliban-controlled areas of Helmand and Kandahar provinces, which British embassy officials in Kabul admit are too dangerous to tackle.
One option is to harvest poppies to produce legal morphine tablets. Dr Farida Bashadost, who supports the Poppies For Medicine programme, said: "Instead of eradicating fields, people should be paid to grow the poppies legally for morphine."
In a bid to fight growing heroin addiction in cities like Kabul, several detox centres have been set up.
The New Life centre in Kabul, which is funded by the British Government, has 10 beds for addicts and takes them in for a month-long rehab programme.
Since it opened in 2003, New Life has treated 1,403 people, 1,169 of them women and children. But it is a struggle to get women to attend, as their husbands forbid them from seeking medical treatment.
At one drug-awareness meeting new mum Rona, 31, said she had given birth to her twins four months early because she ate opium. After they were born she was boiling it down and giving it to her baby girl Manga and toddler son Tohbesh in a bottle.
New Life coordinator Fauzia Louden said: "Often women just don't know the damage heroin and opium does, and even if they do they carry on because they can't afford proper medicine for children when they are sick."
One ray of hope is that Golpari and mother Sabera have now been admitted to Afghanistan's first women-only detox clinic, named after Sanga Amaj - a woman newsreader who was shot dead in her home in Kabul five months ago. Dr Shaesta Foormuli was brutally frank about Golpari's chances of survial: "She won't live to be 20 if she continues smoking heroin. If she doesn't die from the drug abuse, it's likely she'll die of pneumonia because her immune system is so weak."
The centre takes women and children for one-month-long intensive programmes and it is hoping to find them somewhere to stay when they leave.
Sabera said: "I want to start a new life but it will be hard as I can't read or write but I want my daughter and my son to be strong and healthy. I feel like I've got a chance of being a good mother now."
'Mums blow opium smoke into their baby's face to stop them crying from the hunger'
EXPORTS OF DEATH
Since the fall of the Taliban, production of opium has more than doubled in the last two years - the country now has 193,000 hectares of poppy fields.
Experts say this year's bumper harvest will kill 100,000 people directly or indirectly.
So far this year 8,800 tons of opium - worth £50billion - have been produced.
3.3million Afghans are involved in the growth of opium - a family earns £950 on average a year.
IMPORTS OF MISERY
Afghanistan supplies 95 per cent of all the heroin in Britain.
Since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 there are 40,000 more users in the UK, and there is so much heroin on the streets that dealers offer cheap "starter packs".
In three years the cost has fallen 20 per cent to £43 a gram.
An addict spends around £100 a day on heroin and there are now 282,000 addicts in the UK, says the Home Office.
Bron: de Engelse krant Sunday Mirror http://www.sundaymirror.co.uk/news/sund ... -19909643/
DATELINE KABUL: PART 2 OF OUR COMPELLING SERIES EXCLUSIVE She's 11, he's 14. They're among 60,000 child drug addicts in Afghanistan .. so much for the West's boast we'd raze the poppy fields
Kate Mansey In Kabul, Afghanistan [email protected] 07/10/2007
It is early morning in Kabul and two scrawny children sit hunched together on the mud floor of their shack, waiting for their mother to serve breakfast.
But here in the slums of the Afghan capital there is no choice of cereals or toast and marmalade.
There is only heroin.
Using hollow radio antennas as makeshift pipes, 11-year-old Golpari and her brother Zaher, 14, inhale the melted brown liquid from the bowl in front of them. Sitting in a corner their widowed mother Sabera inhales and also floats off into oblivion.
"Smoking heroin is no big thing," says Golpari, who started when she was eight. "I was used to seeing my mum smoking heroin. I'd breathe in the smoke and it used to make me feel light-headed.
"The first time I had it I had pains in my legs. We didn't have medicine and my mother and other people told me it would make me feel better.
"When I inhaled it I started to feel good. You don't feel any pain when you are high until it wears off, so then you have to smoke more. At first I was smoking just a little, but each day I needed more.
When it was too late I realised I was addicted and it was all I cared about. Nobody told me it was bad."
As soon as the heroin wears off, Golpari, who can't read or write and barely eats, starts worrying how she will get the 50p she needs for her next hit.
Wearing her one ragged dress she "works" as a pickpocket in the bazaars of Kabul while her mother sits in a burqa begging at the roadside.
Golpari is just one of more than 60,000 children addicted to heroin in Afghanistan - victims of this year's record opium crop and a telling indictment of Britain's pledge to destroy the Taliban's poppy fields. In fact, the street price has plunged by roughly half since 2001.
Frighteningly, there are now nearly one million addicts in Afghanistan - three per cent of the population. More and more are women, who blow opium smoke into their babies' faces to stop them crying from hunger.
Golpari and her family have a familiar story in a country which has suffered two decades of war.
Sabera was married off by her father at 13 to a man aged 35. Her husband handed her a Kalashnikov and she was told to fight in the war on the Russians.
When her husband died of a heart attack, Sabera had to rely on his family for help and a male cousin told her to try opium when she had a sore leg.
"I was living in Herat and as a lot of people had farms, opium and heroin were always available while medicine was not," says Sabera, who has no official birth certificate but thinks she is "about 45".
"I started smoking opium and moved on to heroin because the effects were better. When I look at my children smoking heroin my heart breaks and I wonder about their future, but I don't know how to stop them because I can't stop myself." When they aren't on the streets scavenging for their next fix, the family stay in a squalid hut owned by a drug-dealer. There is no sanitation, and sewage and blood from a slaughtered sheep flows between the tenements of the shanty town in the Kotisangi district.
Children as young as four look after babies and to fetch water from a well because parents and older brothers and sisters are too high. Golpari says: "It is easy to buy heroin in Kabul. A lot of shops sell it under the counter and I can buy some in five minutes. My ambition is to quit drugs and go to school like other little girls. I want to be a doctor to warn people about heroin."
Her brother Zaher adds: "I have tried to give up a few times but I always go back to it. I say I will give up next week but when the time comes I say, 'OK, next week I will definitely give up'." Despite tough talk from world leaders, the heroin trade is booming. The opium crop has more than doubled in the past two years, particularly in the Taliban-controlled areas of Helmand and Kandahar provinces, which British embassy officials in Kabul admit are too dangerous to tackle.
One option is to harvest poppies to produce legal morphine tablets. Dr Farida Bashadost, who supports the Poppies For Medicine programme, said: "Instead of eradicating fields, people should be paid to grow the poppies legally for morphine."
In a bid to fight growing heroin addiction in cities like Kabul, several detox centres have been set up.
The New Life centre in Kabul, which is funded by the British Government, has 10 beds for addicts and takes them in for a month-long rehab programme.
Since it opened in 2003, New Life has treated 1,403 people, 1,169 of them women and children. But it is a struggle to get women to attend, as their husbands forbid them from seeking medical treatment.
At one drug-awareness meeting new mum Rona, 31, said she had given birth to her twins four months early because she ate opium. After they were born she was boiling it down and giving it to her baby girl Manga and toddler son Tohbesh in a bottle.
New Life coordinator Fauzia Louden said: "Often women just don't know the damage heroin and opium does, and even if they do they carry on because they can't afford proper medicine for children when they are sick."
One ray of hope is that Golpari and mother Sabera have now been admitted to Afghanistan's first women-only detox clinic, named after Sanga Amaj - a woman newsreader who was shot dead in her home in Kabul five months ago. Dr Shaesta Foormuli was brutally frank about Golpari's chances of survial: "She won't live to be 20 if she continues smoking heroin. If she doesn't die from the drug abuse, it's likely she'll die of pneumonia because her immune system is so weak."
The centre takes women and children for one-month-long intensive programmes and it is hoping to find them somewhere to stay when they leave.
Sabera said: "I want to start a new life but it will be hard as I can't read or write but I want my daughter and my son to be strong and healthy. I feel like I've got a chance of being a good mother now."
'Mums blow opium smoke into their baby's face to stop them crying from the hunger'
EXPORTS OF DEATH
Since the fall of the Taliban, production of opium has more than doubled in the last two years - the country now has 193,000 hectares of poppy fields.
Experts say this year's bumper harvest will kill 100,000 people directly or indirectly.
So far this year 8,800 tons of opium - worth £50billion - have been produced.
3.3million Afghans are involved in the growth of opium - a family earns £950 on average a year.
IMPORTS OF MISERY
Afghanistan supplies 95 per cent of all the heroin in Britain.
Since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 there are 40,000 more users in the UK, and there is so much heroin on the streets that dealers offer cheap "starter packs".
In three years the cost has fallen 20 per cent to £43 a gram.
An addict spends around £100 a day on heroin and there are now 282,000 addicts in the UK, says the Home Office.
Bron: de Engelse krant Sunday Mirror http://www.sundaymirror.co.uk/news/sund ... -19909643/
