Pubdate: Wed, 18 Jan 2006
Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
Section: Pg A1
Copyright: 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.wsj.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/487
Author: Philip Shishkin (in Faizabad, Afghanistan) and David Crawford 
(in Berlin)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)

HEAVY TRAFFIC IN AFGHANISTAN, HEROIN TRADE SOARS DESPITE U.S. AID

A Threat To Fragile Democracy, The Drug Spreads Death On Its Route To 
Europe Just Three Euros For A Shot

The suspicious whirring of a motor came from somewhere in the dark 
skies above the river separating Northern Afghanistan from 
Tajikistan. Tajik border guards say they shouted warnings and then 
opened fire. What fell out of the sky was a motorized parachute 
carrying 18 kilograms of heroin. It was a small drop in a mighty 
flood of Afghan heroin that is reshaping the world drug market.

Once best known for opium, the active ingredient in heroin, 
Afghanistan has been working its way up the production ladder.

Now it's the world's largest producer and exporter of heroin.

Clandestine labs churn out so much product that the average heroin 
price in Western Europe tumbled to $75 a gram from $251 in 1990, 
adjusted for inflation, according to the United Nations Office on 
Drugs and Crime. In Hamburg, Germany, a single hypodermic shot of 
Afghan heroin goes for just three euros, or about one-third the price 
a decade ago. "Even 13-year-old children have enough money to get 
into serious trouble," says Mathias Engelmann, a police detective in 
nearby Schacht-Audorf. The business is also spreading disease and 
addiction in Central Asia and Russia, where traffickers have ramped 
up a smuggling route to the heart of Europe. Roughly a third of 
Afghanistan's drug exports go through this so-called northern route, 
supplementing the more-established routes through Iran and Pakistan. 
In Afghanistan itself, the heroin trade jeopardizes the nation's 
fragile democracy, which is struggling to consolidate since U.S.-led 
forces ousted the extremist Taliban and their al Qaeda allies in 
2001. The drug industry dwarfs honest business activity.

In 2005, Afghanistan earned $2.7 billion from opium exports, which 
amounts to 52% of the country's gross domestic product of $5.2 
billion, according to UNODC estimates. "You probably can't build 
democracy in a country where narcotics are such a large part of the 
economy," says John Carnevale, a former senior counternarcotics 
official in the first Bush administration and in the Clinton 
administration. The heroin business has blossomed despite the 
continued presence of thousands of U.S. and European troops.

Some Afghan officials have argued that foreign soldiers should take a 
direct role in combating traffickers. But Western commanders have 
resisted, arguing that they don't have the resources to broaden their mission.

And they worry about alienating local civilians. "Our primary mission 
is a combat mission," says Col. Jim Yonts, a spokesman for the U.S. 
forces in Afghanistan. "We stay focused on our role of defeating the 
Taliban and al Qaeda."

In Afghanistan, people have grown poppies since ancient times, 
originally for purposes ranging from medical use as a painkiller to 
making cooking oil and soap. In the northeast Argu district of the 
Northern Badakshan province, heaps of dry poppy stalks -- already 
emptied of opium -- are piled on top of nearly every mud hut, serving 
both as roofing material and as firewood. Industrial-size harvesting 
of poppies began to develop only in the early 1990s, after war and 
anarchy plunged farmers into persistent poverty.

Poppy cultivation became an attractive alternative to conventional 
crops such as wheat, as heroin merchants used the booming harvests to 
meet the demand for the drug abroad. By the late 1990s, the 
traffickers began to make even more money by converting opium into 
heroin inside Afghanistan, as opposed to letting foreigners do the 
conversion outside and reap the profits.

By locating heroin labs close to the poppy source, they were also 
able to save on transportation of the bulky opium, say people in the 
business and counternarcotics officials. In a hurried effort to curry 
world favor, the Taliban in 2000 used its repressive methods to 
practically wipe out poppy cultivation. But since then, farming of 
poppies and production of heroin have quickly risen beyond their 
heights of the mid-1990s. The post-invasion U.S. counterterrorism 
operations, mostly focused in the south and east of the country, had 
the indirect effect of making drug business there more difficult.

So some heroin merchants expanded to poppy fields in the more 
secluded and peaceful north, setting up hundreds of hidden labs. 
"Badakshan had a really long history of opium, but not of heroin, so 
people from the south went to set up factories there," says a man in 
his late 20s from the Eastern Shinwar district on the Pakistani border.

He said he spent several months working in a Badakshan heroin lab in 
the backyard of a house rented from a local farmer.

Cooks would drop opium into a barrel and heat it over a fire, then 
filter it through a simple flour sack. They'd let the purified opium 
juice dry in the sun. Sometimes using electric mixers, they would 
blend the product with two kinds of acid. "And what you get in the 
end is a beautiful thing -- pure heroin," he summed up. Heroin's 
pervasive hold on the economy is on view in Argu, a town not far from 
the Tajikistan border.

The main narrow street is lined with wooden shacks selling food, 
clothes and assorted necessities. Until a recent raid by Afghan 
special forces from Kabul, many shopkeepers acted as intermediaries 
in the heroin trade. "Poppy farmers used opium as currency.

They came to the Argu shops and exchanged their opium for wheat, for 
instance," said shopkeeper Haji Firouz, over melon slices in the 
office of the local police chief. "Then the heroin makers came to the 
shops, bought the opium, gave us cash, and we would buy more goods 
for the shops." Added Mohammad Nahim, the head of Argu's 
counternarcotics squad: "The drug trade became so normal here that 
everyone is involved." The Afghan government has eradicated some 
poppy fields, destroyed labs and offered incentives for crop 
replacement. The U.S. contributed $780 million to the effort in 2005, 
up from $100 million to cover the three previous years combined.

In Colombia, by comparison, the U.S. has spent $4.5 billion over the 
past six years under its "Plan Colombia" anticocaine program. Afghan 
President Hamid Karzai tapped local religious leaders to expound on 
the evils of opium and threatened provincial governors that they 
would lose their jobs if they didn't reduce poppy cultivation. Those 
efforts had some effect. Total area under poppy cultivation fell to 
104,000 hectares last year from 131,000 hectares in 2004. But 
excellent weather meant the actual opium yields remained virtually 
unchanged. What's more, farmers who switched to other crops say the 
government didn't provide the help it had pledged. "The government 
promised cash, equipment, fertilizer, tractors, seeds, but they 
didn't keep their promises," fumed Abder Rahim, a poppy farmer who 
now has a wheat crop riddled with diseases. This year, he plans to 
grow poppies again.

Afghanistan's police and military are strained by confronting the 
heroin trade. In the provincial capital of Faizabad, the 12-person 
counternarcotics squad doesn't have guns, radios or steady 
transportation. There are supposed to be 22 of them, but not enough 
officers could be found. "I can tell you, I'm really tired of this 
job," says Maj. Ghulam Muheddin, the 50-year-old squad leader, who 
received threats on his life and has been shot at. "I make plans to 
arrest people, and they find out in advance." Maj. Muheddin recently 
arrested a man named Abdel who carried several kilos of heroin.

He was bounced among various police offices and soon released.

The major lives on roughly $90 a month.

A kilo of heroin here costs $900 and up. Border Crossing 
Afghanistan's long border with Tajikistan follows the Panj River 
through rugged mountain terrain that's difficult to police.

It's the first step on Afghan heroin's northward journey toward 
Europe. One night in mid-August, Tajik border guards at the Moskovsky 
crossing shot down the heroin-carrying parachute. For nearly two 
years, the soldiers at this riverside outpost had been hunting for an 
elusive airborne contraption used to transport heroin from 
Afghanistan to Tajikistan -- but could never bring it down. This 
time, they had intelligence about an upcoming flight, according to 
border guard officials.

The next day the machine was all laid out in the courtyard of the 
border guards' barracks: a red, blue and white French-made parachute 
outfitted with a harness ring, a German-made motor, a small 
propeller, a plastic gas canister -- and 18 one-kilo plastic bags of 
Afghan heroin.

The harness ring was to hold a pilot, and the propeller to give him 
control of his direction after jumping from a mountain on the Afghan 
side. The soldiers' bullets had pierced the gas tank, forcing an 
emergency landing, but the guards never found the pilot. A few days 
later, border guards at the same post intercepted a water-borne 
heroin vehicle -- an inner tube from a heavy truck with wooden boards 
laid on top for the smuggler to sit on. Shudi Nurasov, a skinny 
37-year-old citizen of Tajikistan, was navigating the calm waters of 
the Panj with 20 one-kilo bags of heroin worth $24,000, each bearing 
a neat oval stamp reading "AZAD PRIVATE FACTORY. The Best of all 
Export. Super White." But his raft was greeted by armed soldiers when 
it beached in Tajikistan. Wearing a glittery green skullcap and a 
dirty knee-length Afghan shirt, a bedraggled Mr. Nurasov told his story.

A few months earlier, he'd befriended an Afghan man in a Tajik prison 
where he was serving a short drug-related sentence. The Afghan 
eventually entrusted him with the heroin, under a typical deal: 
Within a month, Mr. Nurasov would sell the heroin in Tajikistan and 
then pay his patron $16,000, keeping the rest. Tajikistan stands as a 
stark example of how quickly and deeply this drug can wound a society.

The northern heroin route through the country began spiking 
dramatically three years before the 2001 U.S. invasion next door, 
after the end of a brutal Tajik civil war that claimed more than 60,000 lives.

The war's damage, in a country that had been the Soviet Union's 
poorest republic, drove the Tajiks further into poverty and 
dislocation. And then the Afghan heroin started flowing over the 
border. "We never imagined that there would be heroin in Tajikistan," 
says Gen. Rustam Nazarov, who heads the country's Drug Control 
Agency, established in 1999 with funding mostly from the U.S. "We 
weren't ready." The number of Tajik drug addicts seeking treatment 
has increased eightfold in 10 years, according to government 
statistics, with half of that increase coming since 2001. "This is 
worse than a nuclear bomb," says Batir Zalimov, a 36-year-old former 
heroin user who now works with recovering addicts.

As in Europe, "the addicts are getting younger and younger," he says. 
These days, he says, there are users as young as 14 years old. When 
the first wave of heroin washed over from Afghanistan, Tajik youths 
had no idea how dangerous and addictive the drug was, especially when 
taken intravenously. "It was very prestigious, we saw drugs in 
movies," says one resident of the small drug clinic where Mr. Zalimov 
works, in the Tajik capital of Dushanbe. The rise in shooting heroin 
has spun off a Tajik AIDS problem in the past five years, and 5,000 
people are now estimated to have HIV. Eighty percent of all new cases 
are passed through dirty needles.

Tajikistan has just negotiated its first-ever order of antiretroviral 
drugs. Russian Seizures Most heroin that passes through Tajikistan 
travels onward, through Kazakhstan to Russia. Last summer, Tajik 
investigators got a tip about a train-car with heroin departing from 
Tajikistan to a Russian town in Western Siberia. The train was 
eventually impounded in Russia. Hidden deep inside a shipment of 
onions in one car were 74 kilos of heroin packaged into round rubber 
containers made to resemble real onions. In Russia, seizures of 
heroin reached 3.9 metric tons in 2004, the latest UNODC statistic, 
triple the previous all-time high in 2001, while street prices 
decreased in the same period.

In Russia, which already has one of the world's highest growth rates 
in the spread of AIDS, many of the new infections are passed through 
dirty needles.

What's left of the contraband after the Russian journey pushes on to 
Western Europe through Poland and other Eastern European countries.

European police and social workers say heroin fell out of favor in 
Europe in the 1990s, but the drug is making a comeback today. When 
prices began to fall as production rose in the mid-1990s, addiction 
in Germany grew first among the immigrant community from Central 
Asia, say German police reports.

Police statistics show double-digit annual percentage increases in 
the amounts of heroin seized in Germany as production rose in 
Afghanistan. As Afghan poppy cultivation doubled, so too did the 
misery in Europe, with the deaths per year in the European Union 
rising from about 4,000 to over 9,000 during the decade.

After poppy production dipped sharply in 2001, the number of heroin 
deaths in Europe also dipped in 2002. In Germany, drug deaths doubled 
to 2,030 in 2000 from 991 in 1989, then declined to 1,513 in 2002 as 
the effects of the Taliban's poppy ban reached Europe. Since 2003 the 
death rates have fluctuated, but are highest in regions such as 
Berlin that are dominated by heroin imported along the northern 
route, according to German police data. Ivan, a 23-year-old immigrant 
from Kazakhstan who asked that his last name not be used, recalls a 
party on Christmas Eve, 1999, when he and nine friends celebrated at 
a friend's home in Leipzig, Germany. Among the gifts exchanged by the 
five couples that evening was Ivan's first shot of heroin. "I just 
wanted to try it once," he said. Within three years, all 10 Christmas 
celebrants had tried heroin, and two were dead from overdoses, Ivan 
said. Heroin has more of a stigma among native Germans, says Bernd 
Westermann, a social worker at a center assisting drug addicts in 
Berlin. "It's been years since heroin was cool," he says. But German 
users often take heroin as a second drug to smooth the effects of 
ecstasy or cocaine. Heroin from the southern and eastern routes 
through Iran and Pakistan also makes its way to Europe. Mr. 
Engelmann, the Hamburg-area police detective, says heroin is cheaper 
in northern Germany than in the south, in part because of cheaper 
smuggling costs along the route that leads to northern Germany. A 
German police report says better roads in the former Soviet Union 
compared to roads in Pakistan and Iran simplify the work of smugglers 
along the northern route out of Afghanistan. Russian crime 
organizations also take advantage of the high volume of trade between 
Russia and Germany to hide shipments of heroin in a handful of the 
thousands of trucks that ply the transit routes from Russia via 
Poland to northern Germany. As the last step in the trail, some 
Afghan heroin is making its way to the U.S. The U.S. Drug Enforcement 
Administration says Afghan heroin is increasing its market share in 
New York because Russian and Eastern European drug cartels can buy 
Afghan heroin on the northern route at a price significantly below 
the price of South American heroin. As in Europe, the purity of 
heroin on American streets has increased and the price has fallen in 
stride with production increases in Afghanistan, according to UN and 
U.S. government statistics. Most of the heroin on the U.S. market 
still comes from South America. But Afghan heroin increasingly is 
being brought in by Pakistani, West African and Eastern European 
traffickers, says the Justice Department report. "It is often 
smuggled through Central Asia and Europe," says the report, and often 
comes in "via air cargo and express mail services."
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