Drug users in Afghanistan tops to 3 million

The recent research by US foreign ministry indicates that the number of drug users in Afghanistan reach to 3 million.

Not only is Afghanistan the global leader in opium production, but Afghans are now the leading consumers of their own drugs. The number of Afghan drug addicts now stands at nearly three million, up from less than 500,000 just two years ago. One Afghan health official describes the drug scourge as a “tsunami for our country”.

The survey was conducted in rural areas of 24 provinces of the country and shows that about 1.4 million people use drugs daily and in additional 1.6 million sporadically use drugs in Afghanistan.

With NATO troops pulling out and local law enforcement agencies ill-equipped and underfunded, production looks set to increase even further. And with the Taliban andal-Qaeda funded by the drug trade, fears are rising that further instability could wreak more havoc on this war-torn nation.

Drug use inside Afghanistan has spiked, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. About 1.3 million Afghan adults were regular drug users in 2012, up from 1 million in 2009; regular opium users grew to 230,000 in 2009 from 130,000 in 2005. The population of Afghanistan is just under 32 million.

Beyond Afghanistan’s borders, about three-quarters of the world’s illicit opium products originates from the country, which sees its poppy cultivation concentrated almost entirely in the country’s southern and western provinces.

Afghan authorities are struggling to control the resurgence in poppy farming that feeds the habits of addicts worldwide.

In 2013, coalition and Afghan forces seized 41,000kg of opium, while Afghans produced 5.5m kilograms of it. Overall operations are down 17% since 2011, with opium seizures down 57% and heroin seizures down 77%. As well, much of the country’s drug trafficking is invisible or inaccessible to the Afghan forces the US mentors and funds.

In another report by Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) Afghanistan is housing the equivalent of 400,000 football fields worth of opium fields, despite the United States having spent billions in taxpayer funds to combat the growth of illicit narcotics.

Security in Afghanistan also continues to deteriorate, making it more difficult for inspectors to provide oversight on the projects receiving U.S. funding.

The explosion in opiate production, unaffected by the $7.5bn spent by the US since 2002 to combat it, puts “the entire US and donor investment in the reconstruction of Afghanistan at risk,” special inspector general John Sopko told a Senate panel in January.

Reported by Wahid Nawesa