Those students who studied The Kite Runner will know of the heartbreaking poverty in Afghanistan. What they may not know is how many Afghan children are addicted to heroin as a way of escaping the pain and poverty in their lives. The Daily Mirror recently published the following article:
It is early morning in Kabul and two scrawny children sit hunched together on the mud floor of their shack, waiting for their mother to serve breakfast.
But here in the slums of the Afghan capital there is no choice of cereals or toast and marmalade.
There is only heroin.
Using hollow radio antennas as makeshift pipes, 11-year-old Golpari and her brother Zaher, 14, inhale the melted brown liquid from the bowl in front of them. Sitting in a corner their widowed mother Sabera inhales and also floats off into oblivion.
“Smoking heroin is no big thing,” says Golpari, who started when she was eight. “I was used to seeing my mum smoking heroin. I’d breathe in the smoke and it used to make me feel light-headed.
“The first time I had it I had pains in my legs. We didn’t have medicine and my mother and other people told me it would make me feel better.
“When I inhaled it I started to feel good. You don’t feel any pain when you are high until it wears off, so then you have to smoke more. At first I was smoking just a little, but each day I needed more.
When it was too late I realised I was addicted and it was all I cared about. Nobody told me it was bad.”
As soon as the heroin wears off, Golpari, who can’t read or write and barely eats, starts worrying how she will get the 50p she needs for her next hit.
Wearing her one ragged dress she “works” as a pickpocket in the bazaars of Kabul while her mother sits in a burqa begging at the roadside.
Golpari is just one of more than 60,000 children addicted to heroin in Afghanistan – victims of this year’s record opium crop and a telling indictment of Britain’s pledge to destroy the Taliban’s poppy fields. In fact, the street price has plunged by roughly half since 2001.
Frighteningly, there are now nearly one million addicts in Afghanistan – three per cent of the population. More and more are women, who blow opium smoke into their babies’ faces to stop them crying from hunger.
english@cc 