Afghanistan's Most Wretched Battle Addiction

KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan. 8, 2008— -- Assadullah's blackened hand pushes up a jacket sleeve. As if it were a trophy, he presents a skinny arm notched with track marks. The Afghan heroin addict's veins have gone flat, making the featureless landscape of his forearm look like a child's.

Rolling down his Shawal Kamis trousers, he then displayed the only entry point left on his body: his femoral vein high up on the inside of his thigh.

Assadullah's fellow addicts impassively watch the spectacle here at a bombed out cultural center, built by the Soviets in the 1980s and promptly destroyed by Afghan warlords during the civil war in the early 1990s. The Soviets called it the Center of Knowledge and Culture.

Ghostly figures slouch through the structure, beneath the spot where Lenin's dour face has been chipped off an enormous mural. Piles of syringes and feces are left where junkies dropped them.

Assadullah, 37, is one of tens of thousands of Afghan addicts. They crowd the city's bombed-out buildings, often deploying by the thousands to score a dose, and then slouching back to these fetid lairs.

Their ranks have swelled the past two years, thanks largely to two years of bumper poppy crops and a botched narcotics war waged by the Afghan government -- whose own woefully paid police and anti-narcotics officials either smuggle the drug or turn a blind eye to it if bribed well enough.

Corruption is by no means limited to anti-narcotics officials. Border police at the Kabul Airport often find invented "contraband" on foreigners, in the hopes of coercing "bakshish," or a bribe.

Afghanistan has cornered the poppy and heroin market, now producing more than 90 percent of the world's heroin. That huge supply has driven down the street price for the drug here. A 1-gram dose now goes for 60 Afghan rupees, or about $1.10.

The poppy industry has also set off a "secondhand" epidemic; children and spouses of heroin or opium refiners have become hooked from the particles on spouses or father's clothing.