Pubdate: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 Source: WorldNetDaily Copyright: 1999 WorldNetDaily.com, Inc. Contact: http://WorldNetDaily.com Forum: http://www.becounted.com/ Author: Ahmar Mustikhan PAKISTAN'S HEROIN ADDICTION BOMB 2 Million Of The 'Living Dead' Prowl Urban Areas KARACHI, Pakistan -- They are called the "living dead" -- scavenging for food in the dirtiest of the open garbage heaps, or squatting cock-style in rows in front of cheap Karachi hotels in congested market places just in case any pious customer may buy them a free meal. They can be seen sitting in a group on road pavements, or even inside the manholes of the underground drainage lines, inhaling the lethal whitish fumes. They are called heroinchis, or heroin addicts, easily identified because of their dirty shalwar-kamiz (baggy Pakistani suits), unshaven face, the lost gaze in their eyes and the pale color of their skin. As the world marks the "International Drugs Eradication Day," there is little hope that any good would come to these heroin addicts who number 2 million in Pakistan today. "Between themselves these 2 million heroin addicts puff away 130 metric tons of the deadly white powder each year," says noted Pakistani psychiatrist Dr. Saleem Azam, lamenting that facilities to treat or rehabilitate the heroin addicts are almost non-existent in the country. The last national survey showed that the number of heroin addicts had grown 7 percent per year between 1988 to 1993, and Azam conservatively estimates the same growth rate from 1993 onwards. This translates into 16 new heroin addicts with each passing hour. A significant percentage of the heroin addicts are street dwellers, and what is most ominous is that at least 10 percent of such street heroin addicts are children, experts say. Entire families are vulnerable to the deadly addiction in Pakistan today, because already 8 percent of the total heroin addicts are women. There is a diabolical link between heroin addiction and peddling. "A study showed that 76 percent of all heroin addicts themselves retail the drug to support their addiction. The addict buys an extra packet for Rs 50 ($1) and sells it for Rs 75 ($1.5), earning half the money for the next packet for himself," Azam said. Thus, as the number of addicts goes on increasing, there is a corresponding rise in the sales force. Curing the addicts and bringing them back to sobriety may remain an elusive dream. The detoxification takes about 15 days and this is done in centers where the addicts are kept locked "because the urge for that last puff is so strong, that seldom does a heroin addict have the will power to continue treatment if his mobility is not checked." The cost of the detoxification treatment is at least $10 per day, which means that in a country where the average per capita income is $483 per annum nearly 99 percent of the addicts can never afford to come to these centers. But the more painful and slow process is that of rehabilitation, because experts say this is the real test for any cleaning up. There are hardly five rehabilitation centers of any repute for heroin addicts throughout Pakistan and, at any given time, they can in total lodge less than 3,000 patients. Reaching a rehabilitation center does not hold any guarantee of divorcing the drug for life. Those who run the centers concede that less than 5 percent of all who come to them quit the killer drug for good, while 95 percent get hooked again. In most cases, heroin is sold in Pakistan cities under the watchful eyes of the police, who have a stake in the local drug trade. For instance in Karachi's oldest shanty area of Lyari, also called the Harlem of Pakistan, drug peddling is a thriving business and continues from dawn well until midnight in the presence of the police. The drug barons are Afghans, Iranians or Pakistanis belonging to the ethnic Pakthun community, the middlemen and peddlers are of the Baloch ethnicity, and the customers are mainly from the Mohajir ethnic community. Gunfights between rival drug gangs often break out in this otherwise sleepy locality, but police seldom intervene because of obvious reasons. Public opinion is unanimous in blaming the military junta that ruled Pakistan during the 1980s for the heroin curse. At the time, a bloody, communists vs. Mujahideen war -- the former helped by the erstwhile Red Army and the latter aided by the U.S. CIA -- was being staged in neighboring Afghanistan. With the West looking the other way, and fully backing the military dictators, heroin addiction made inroads in Pakistan society. It's an open secret that the Afghan Mujahideen transported the first consignments of the deadly powder to Pakistan in the early 1980s when Afghanistan was under Russian occupation. But now there is no turning back the clock of history. The hope is fast fading that the war against heroin, even though it may be started in real earnest, can ever be won. Afghanistan produced 3,269 metric tons of opium in 1998 -- up by 16 percent over the year before -- and the area under cultivation rose to 63,674 hectares in 1998, or an increase of nine percent as compared to 1997. The ruling Taleban's drug controlling authorities see no evil in poppy cultivation, arguing that Islam allowed adherents to do forbidden things when human lives were under threat. The Taleban warriors imply that if the Afghan farmers were not allowed to cultivate poppy, they may as well starve to death. Reports say lush green poppy fields can be seen in Afghanistan's Kandahar valley, once a granary of apples, grapes and other fruits. The apple production in this area before the war (1979 to date) was so huge that villagers used the fruit to clean themselves after attending a "call of nature." But now the poppy is the most favored cash crop -- one kilogram of which fetches the farmer around 50 U.S. dollars. The farmers say that no one in his right mind would replace poppy with wheat, which would sell for less than a dollar. Authoritative press reports say international drug barons from Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Central Asia and elsewhere are regular visitors to a place called Sangin inside Afghanistan with opium shops galore. The opium is refined to heroin either in Afghanistan itself or in the no-man's tribal land in adjacent areas of Pakistan and smuggled into Pakistani cities. Commanders of assorted factions of the Mujahideen groups, notably the ruling Taleban, hold a big stake in the heroin smuggling. "Armed to the teeth, the smugglers move in convoys of the latest model four-wheel vehicles, fitted with state-of-the-art communication equipment. When we see them coming our way, we have to make way for them," said a major in the Pakistan army's Frontier Corps, that guard the borders with Iran and Afghanistan. In Iran, the carriers get the payments in the form of bag-loads of dollars and the heroin is then transported in other vehicles to Turkey, and from there smuggled across Western Europe. Other convoys snake through smuggler routes in the rugged terrain of Pakistan's southwestern Balochistan province and reach Karachi, the commercial capital of Pakistan. A part of the heroin is consumed locally here and the rest is sea-shipped to Europe via East African ports and the gold-glittering free port of Dubai in the Gulf. - --- MAP posted-by: Jo-D