Opium: The Prescription for Survival in Afghanistan

The small enclosed field behind the mud house in the mountainous village of Kwaja Ghaar in north-eastern Afghanistan has been freshly ploughed.

Ali, the local farmer, flashes an embarrassed grin. No, he didn’t plant any grain this year, he says. It doesn’t fetch any money and besides the ground is too dry, he points out.

Instead he planted opium poppy like almost all the farmers in the surrounding region. "What can we do? If we plant wheat or maize, we don’t get any money for it on the market," he says. "Even if I harvested 100 kilograms of wheat and sold it, it wouldn’t be enough to see my family through the winter," Ali explains. "We’re forced to plant opium."

No clue about the consequences

Ali managed to harvest seven kilograms of raw opium this year. At a price of about $300 a kilo, he earned almost $2100 totally -- enough to help his wife and 11 children survive the long bitter winter.

Ali didn’t have to do anything apart from planting and harvesting the opium poppy crop. He can’t read and he isn’t really interested in the fact that thousands of kilometers away in Europe 0. 700 grams of pure heroin worth €70,000 has been refined from his seven kilograms of raw opium.

"I have no idea, how and where they produce the heroin. The buyer comes to me, I give him the raw opium, he gives me my money and that’s it," Ali says.

Naturally, Ali knows it’s forbidden to plant opium. But he shrugs. He says he hasn’t had a problem so far, nobody’s really interested. "Maybe that will change once we have a new constitution and a real government, that has actual powers," Ali says.

"But I’ll tell you something: when you’re hungry, you do whatever’s needed to get a piece of bread." The 54-year-old small-time farmer from Kwaja Ghaar has already made up his mind: he’ll be planting opium again next year.

Turning a blind eye to drug dealing?

Over at the northernmost tip of the regional capital of Kunduz, where German peacekeeping troops moved in recently, police chief Hafi Sulah is responsible for monitoring goods that come into the city. The bazaar or marketplace of the 120,000-strong city is rumored to be one of the central places for drug trafficking and dealing in raw opium in northern Afghanistan.

"We take our controls very seriously," Sulah says. "The people who smuggle opium and deal in drugs are under our scrutiny," he explains confidently. "We’ve often found things."

But reality shows otherwise. The police in northern Kunduz only control private cars. But the brand new jeeps with their tinted glass windows and all vehicles, that look halfway official, speed by without any of the policemen so much as raising a hand to flag them down.

The suspicion that authorities could be turning a blind eye to drug traffickers is strengthened after a visit to the central prison in Kunduz.

About 100 male prisoners group together in the inner courtyard. Prison director Abdel-Halim Samanwal leafs through the jail register: 42 murderers, 27 thieves, 14 rapists and adulterers, ten homosexuals, he says. There’s just one prisoner who’s been arrested for drug-dealing.

A vicious cycle

Afganistan’s Interior Minister Ali Jalali repeats what is common knowledge in the country. "The police are often part of the system," he says.

Those who are meant to battle the drug trade on behalf of the weak state are often themselves in cahoots with the offenders. In addition, there are the powerful warlords and local commanders, who don’t take any orders from Kabul, and often force small farmers to plant opium.

Afghanistan can’t solve the problem alone. As long as there isn’t a strong government in place, the opium poppy trade will continue to flourish.

And as long as the farmers have no alternative and the insatiable market in Europe and the United States grows further, raw opium will remain their most important income source. Around 1.7 million people live from the pink buds and their sticky brown extract. That’s about 7 percent of Afghanistan’s total population.