The Road to Ruin : Drugs and Disease
Stanley Greene
NOOR pour Russian Reporter Magazine
Crackdowns on the traditional exit routes for Afghan opium have forced smugglers to head north. The result: a rising sea of drugs in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Badakhshan, along the historic “Silk Road”. Osh, in Kyrgyzstan, is rapidly becoming the best place in the world to buy opium, the hub of a revitalized Silk Road, perhaps history’s most famous highway. The route that wound for 5,000 miles from China across vast steppes, through the mountains of Afghanistan to the open ports of the Mediterranean has now reopened for a compelling reason, to carry an ever-growing caravan of drugs through Central Asia.
Since the 2001 US invasion, Afghanistan has re-emerged as the world’s largest opium and heroin-producing country, with nearly one million drug users, according to United Nations estimates. Most users still smoke the drug, but five years ago, injectable heroin hit the streets of Kabul, the capital. Now there are at least 19,000 intravenous drug users here, according to World Bank estimates.
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Addicts, mostly male, infest the older neighborhoods of Kabul and surrounding communities, as well as the outlying provinces. Along with its world-famous opium, Afghanistan is steadily becoming one of the biggest exporters of HIV/AIDS. There are four ways of transmitting HIV; the most common is injecting drugs, then barber shops, dentists, and sexual relations.
The incidence of HIV/AIDS in neighboring countries is linked to the use of heroin from Afghanistan, plus increasing intravenous use and needle-sharing, practices that directly affect the rates of HIV and other diseases transmitted through blood contact. Like the camel caravans that carried tea and spices thousands of years ago, kilos of opium, bundled up in burlap and hidden in rusting Soviet-era vehicles, now travel along one of the most remote stretches of the Silk Road. Villagers call the 750 kilometers of asphalt that bisects the towering Pamir Mountains, the “Road of Life” as it is their sole link with the outside world. But now their lifeline has become a drug runner's mainline, connecting Afghanistan's vast poppy fields with the bazaars of Central Asia.
In winter, it can take smugglers a week to make it through the craggy passes and steep valleys from the Pamiri capital, Khorog, near the Tajik-Afghan border, to Osh on the Kyrgyz side of the mountains. In the hands of the burgeoning generation of local users, some will be injected intravenously, some of it will be boiled into tea, or given to children as sleeping pills, while women use it to work long hours. Most of it, however, will mature into heroin and hit Russia's street corners, or, via direct flights from former Soviet states, reach its most profitable destinations: Europe and America.
Commissioned by the French National Center for Visual Arts – Ministery of Culture and Communication
