1 million addicts
An event commemorating this year’s International Women’s Day was held at one of Afghanistan’s 20 drug rehabilitation centers. This one, located in Kabul, treats women only. One of the chief guests that day was Shahpor Yosuf, head of the anti-drug department at Afghanistan’s public health department. Unlike most speakers, who choose to share only good news on such an occasion, she got straight to the facts.
Afghanistan has between 900,000 and 1 million female drug addicts, and nearly 100,000 child addicts, she told the audience. Many of the women are first introduced to drugs through husbands who are already addicted, and from there begins the dark and despair-filled path to dependency and addiction. Even if they make it to a drug treatment center, they are likely to return to addiction as soon as they are released and return home.
One month after International Women’s Day, there is even more bleak news regarding Afghanistan’s drug epidemic. According to a quarterly report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), an independent oversight agency in the US, opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan increased by 63 percent in the 2017 growing season.
Raw poppy cultivation experienced an even bigger boost of 88 percent last year. The huge bumper crop is likely to increase the supply of heroin and result in even higher rates of addiction.
Even with this grim specter looming over 2018, little is being done to prepare for it. There does not seem to be any effort to increase the number of drug rehabilitation centers, or even launch public-awareness programs or needle exchanges that could help reduce the impact of drug addiction in society. Afghanistan has an ambitious Drug Action Plan that was developed in 2015, but it has yet to be implemented.
There are more complications given that the US Agency for International Development (USAID) recently announced that it will not be proposing, designing or implementing any new programs to reduce poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. The US State Department has been developing a counter-narcotics strategy since 2014, but has yet to finalize it.
It is time that Afghan and Pakistani women combine their efforts and confront the bleak epidemic that is threatening both sides.
Rafia Zakaria
In past years, reducing poppy cultivation — a direct source of income for Tehreek-e-Taliban militants — has been a means of ending funding to the group and bringing it to the negotiating table.
This strategy’s future is unknown, despite the US Department of Defense saying the trafficking, sale and cultivation of illicit drugs continue to fund the insurgency. The rise in the number of suicide attacks in Afghanistan can be tied to the fact that insurgent groups stand to benefit directly from the bumper poppy crop.
Amid all these grim prognoses, the SIGAR report notes that droughts have historically caused a reduction in poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. If a drought comes, all crops — including poppies — are likely to suffer. Droughts cause great increases in the price of wheat, making it lucrative to cultivate instead of opium.
The very existence of such hypotheses reflects how desperate the situation has become. It also ignores the fact that a drought would devastate the lives of so many Afghans who are not addicted to drugs. A drought may reduce poppy cultivation, but it will kill as many, or perhaps even more, innocent people as the scourge of drugs.
As a neighbor, Pakistan needs to think seriously about the consequences of an increase in poppy cultivation and drug addiction in Afghanistan. What happens across the border inevitably has an impact in Pakistan. Moreover, the situation of Afghan women and children who become addicted to heroin presents a humanitarian crisis that requires immediate assistance.
While Pakistan has plenty of addiction problems of its own, a combined effort targeted at women who face addiction issues on either side of the border would be groundbreaking and lifesaving.
Events such as International Women’s Day come and go, and promises are made and challenges enumerated. It is time that Afghan and Pakistani women combine their efforts and confront the bleak epidemic that is threatening both sides. Women’s empowerment is impossible without women’s cooperation, and that is the urgent need of the day.
Women who live in rural environments, or who may not have access to information about drug addiction, need to be educated via large-scale public-awareness programs through the media and female health workers. Unless this is done, Afghanistan (and soon Pakistan) will likely have many more than 1 million female drug addicts, all of them suffering, unable to access any help.
– Rafia Zakaria is the author of “The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan” and “Veil.” She writes regularly for The Guardian, the Boston Review, the New Republic, the New York Times Book Review and many other publications. Twitter: @rafiazakaria
