Home » World » Taliban Say To Ban Drugs, But Reality Is Different

Taliban Say To Ban Drugs, But Reality Is Different

Eric Feijten

NOS Newsyesterday, 22:05

  • Aletta Andre

    Correspondent India

  • Aletta Andre

    Correspondent India

Surrounded by bodies, excrement and rubbish, dozens of men crouched under the Pul-e-Sokhta Bridge in Kabul. They have one goal: to inhale the smoke that rises from the silver foil on which they heat some powder heroin.

There is nothing in the scene to indicate that the Taliban have successfully implemented an announced drug ban. “It’s a lot more expensive now,” says one of the drug-addicted people under the bridge. But the high price does not discourage him. “An addict would even risk his life to get enough money.”

Every now and then he looks around shyly. “If the Taliban see you, they beat you up. And they regularly arrest people here.”

Taliban ask for tax

Earlier this year, the Taliban announced a ban on drug production and trafficking. That is not easy. Hundreds of thousands of people earn their income from the drug industry, not least the Taliban themselves. Eighty percent of the world’s heroin comes from Afghanistan, and large amounts of crystal meth have also been produced in recent years. The Taliban tax producers and smugglers.

The ban was announced when the farmers were about to harvest their poppies. For a moment there was the fear that the Taliban would come and burn all the plants, but this did not happen. In Uruzgan, one of the poppy regions, the remains of the harvested plants are scattered all over the fields.

  • Eric Feijten

    Addicts under the Pul-e-Sokhta Bridge in Kabul

  • Eric Feijten

    An addict who is forced to be in a clinic in Kabul

  • Eric Feijten

    Addicts under the Pul-e-Sokhta Bridge in Kabul

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And so the drug remains easily available to addicts within Afghanistan. These are regularly picked up to kick the habit. In many provinces this happens in prison. In Kabul, many addicts end up in the Ibn Sina hospital, which has room for 1000 patients. Since the takeover by the Taliban, there are often more, says Ishaq Auryani, who works there as a psychologist.

The addicts go through a program of one and a half months, in which they first undergo physical rehab and then have sessions with a psychologist.

Terrified of hospital

The men in the hospital look emaciated. One of them says in Dutch that the food is bad and that there is little of it. The addicted man under the bridge also tells this, who himself went through the program two years earlier. “Everyone is terrified of that hospital. If you ask for medicine or whatever, they beat you up. And if you come out again, and you see the drugs right in front of you, you’re going to start using again.”

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The Taliban – who are they anyway?

Auryani calls the high availability of drugs a major cause of the high level of drug use in Afghanistan, alongside poverty and the decades-long war. More than ten percent of all Afghans use drugs. Hundreds of thousands of women and children are among them. For many it is a way to forget their traumas. At least 60 percent of Afghans experienced a traumatic event at least once, which makes depression and anxiety very common.

Syed Amin, one of the patients, has been an addict for twenty years, since he was a teenager. Then he left for Iran alone to earn money after his mother died and his father ran off. Once back in Afghanistan, he tried to kick the habit at least fifty times before. “It’s the unemployment, and the lack of family support, and the depression you get from it all that makes drugs the only way out,” he says.

He has also been through a lot. “A lot of explosions,” he says. “Once it even happened right in front of me. I saw body parts fly up into the air and land back on the ground.”

No follow-up treatment

Amin has finished his treatment and is allowed to leave the hospital on the day NOS is visiting. He’s determined to stay away from drugs this time, but the odds aren’t very high.

“Thirty to forty percent of patients are not here for the first time,” Dr. Auryani says. “Unfortunately, there is no follow-up treatment for patients after they leave the hospital. Staying clean takes more than just willpower. The love of family is important, too, and a job. Many addicts have lost their families and unemployment in Afghanistan is high. very high.”

“I have to start from scratch,” says Amin. “Maybe I can beg money for transport or an overnight stay in a hotel. It will be very hard. But anything is better than being addicted.”

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