A Cry For Help: The Human Face of Drug Addiction

“AT FIRST, the drug took me to the stars and skies,” recounts Zabihollah, a young ex-police officer and heroin addict, in an interview conducted for Radio Netherlands. “But it’s a terrible thing that destroys families,” he adds.

His habit was costing him more than his policeman’s monthly income and he was desperate to stop it. But, as he soon realized, heroin addiction also exposes him to high risk of contracting HIV/AIDS as sharing needles and syringes is a common practice among Kabul’s injecting drug users.

Zabihollah enrolled at the NEJAT Center, a rehabilitation center assisted, as a pilot initiative, by the Asian Development Bank’s “NGO Initiatives to Prevent HIV/AIDS” project. There he underwent a difficult detox program over two months. Monitored by doctors and the center’s staff, he and four other addicts went through the pain of withdrawal: sleepless days, inability to eat or drink, extreme discomfort and nightmares.

Zabihollah considers himself lucky to have been accepted by the NEJAT Center because it can only treat 40 patients a month.

The demand for space at similar centers is tremendous. According to the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime, Kabul City alone has more than 60,000 heroin addicts. In the north of the country, entire villages are addicted, including women and children. Afghanistan doesn’t have enough detox centers to meet the needs of its growing population of addicts.

Radio Netherlands, quoting freelance photo journalist Thorne Anderson, says there are three main factors contributing to the alarming rise in heroin and opium use in Afghanistan: decades of war and its accompanying trail of ruined families and communities, the presence of facilities in the country for the first time for processing opium into heroin, and the flood of returning refugees from neighboring Iran and Pakistan. Both countries have serious drug addiction problems of their own.

Anderson says he saw addicts of Kabul living in hulls of buildings destroyed by years of bombardment. “These are creepy places and there are figures skulking in corners, huddled over fires, some of them near death; it’s like seeing scenes from Dante’s Hell,” he adds.

Anderson, who interviewed Zabihollah, said he feels Zabihollah has a better chance of completing rehab with strong family support.

Zabihollah’s own dream is to return to his police job to specialize in treating drug addicts. Anderson has witnessed police hunting out drug addicts and beating and kicking them on the streets as criminals. Zabihollah wants to train his police colleagues to handle drug addicts in a more humane way, saying: “Drug addicts are not bad people; we are sick people.”

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