Sign of Afghan Addiction May Also Be Its Remedy

Sign of Afghan Addiction May Also Be Its Remedy
By ROD NORDLAND and ABDUL WAHEED WAFA
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 16, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/world/asia/17afghan.html?th&emc=th


KABUL, Afghanistan — The Hospital for Interior Ministry Addicts is both a symptom of how bad this country’s drug addiction problem is, and a possible solution for one of its worst aspects.

On the one hand, its patients are all policemen. On the other hand, those policemen are no longer on the street, trying to feed heroin and opium addictions that can easily cost triple their official salaries.

Gen. Dawood Dawood, the country’s drug enforcer as deputy interior minister for counternarcotics, was so proud of the three-month-old institution that he issued a personally signed letter authorizing reporters to visit Sunday. When hospital officials balked — saying they were worried the incarcerated policemen would be so angry they might throw rocks at visitors — the general’s staff intervened to make sure the visit took place.

Before the tour, General Dawood said at a news conference that a systematic program that had so far administered urine tests to 95 percent of the Afghan National Police found 1,231 of them addicted to hard drugs, mostly heroin and opium — a rate of about 1.5 percent of the force. Afghanistan also has a severe shortage of trained police officers, so instead of firing them, it has begun sending them to the Hospital for Interior Ministry Addicts for three- to four-week rehabilitation programs.

Those figures were no surprise. A Government Accountability Office report for the United States Congress last March noted that 12 to 41 percent of Afghan police recruits tested positive for drug use, although that included marijuana and hashish as well as opiates. Recruits who test positive for hard drugs are dismissed, but the others are kept and given counseling. Since opiates disappear from the body quickly, however, many of the recruits could easily have avoided getting caught — apparently explaining the high number of addicts found still on the force.

The recovering policemen in the hospital, as it turned out, made no use of the many stones in the courtyard, and instead proved eager to tell their stories.

Most, like First Lt. Juma Khan Asak, 40, a border patrolman from western Afghanistan, were long-term addicts. Lieutenant Asak said he had been smoking first opium and then heroin since he was 17, long before he joined the police. Now that the eldest of his eight children was that age, he had grown concerned that his children would follow him into addiction. He turned himself in for treatment.

“I was spending 1,000 afghanis a day,” he said, “and I could no longer do my job properly.” That amount, about $20, was approximately twice his lieutenant’s salary; asked how he could afford that and support a big family, he just shrugged.

On the western border, the major concern of the police there is interdicting drug smugglers making for Iran.

Like the other patients, Lieutenant Asak was dressed in striped pajamas. At present, there are 50 of them in all, of whom 11 were lieutenants and above.

The facilities are modest, a collection of former school buildings and prefab barracks, with one television for staff members and patients and little else in the way of recreation. With no generator, there is often no running water or electricity. But the patient-to-staff ratio, at least, is the envy of almost any drug rehabilitation center: it has 12 doctors, two of them psychiatrists, as well as social workers and counselors.

So far, said Dr. Doust Mohammed, a psychiatrist and the medical director, the 100-bed hospital has treated 600 policemen; the other 600 who have tested positive nationwide are scheduled to come here in coming months. “Of those 600, only two have relapsed so far,” Dr. Mohammed said. Those who relapse are fired, he said.

Though it is too early to know how the patients do over the long term, Dr. Shafi Azim, a psychiatrist who has worked in drug rehabilitation for 13 years, said the policemen make particularly good patients. “They’re military men and they’re used to taking orders,” he said. “And they want to recover their pride and dignity.”

Mohammed Ishaq Rezia, 34, a police captain from Daykondi Province in central Afghanistan, blamed his opium addiction on a combination of poor education, constant warfare, easy drug availability and “bad friends.” “A few years back, the entire country was under opium, and it was easy to find it,” he said. “It was so bad that even as policemen we had the freedom to smoke opium openly. But that’s over now.”

Afghanistan has succeeded in eradicating poppy cultivation from 20 of its 34 provinces in recent years, through a combination of incentives offered to local government, military intervention by Afghan forces, and large-scale international aid to programs like crop substitution. Nonetheless, record poppy harvests until recently have depressed opium prices, and the country still supplies 90 percent of the world’s heroin.

This year that looks likely to change significantly, as a mysterious pestilence has been killing off the poppies, with some predictions that 70 percent of the poppy harvest will fail this year. In turn, drug control officials fear, that will drive the price for opium back up, and discourage farmers from changing to other crops.

Drug-testing programs among policemen and recruits are also new, going large-scale only in the past year. “Counternarcotics is one of the priorities of our minister,” said an Interior Ministry spokesman, Zemarai Bashary, referring to Mohammed Hanif Atmar. “In particular we are trying our best to have a sound police force, free of narcotics.”

Sangar Rahimi contributed reporting.