Afghanistan’s 1-Year-Old Opium Addicts

A young boy offers me a plug of hash in Wardak Province

AP has a really uplifting story this morning (and by uplifting I of course mean soul crushingly sad) about a remote Afghan village populated almost entirely by opium addicts, some as young as 1-years-old. From the story:

It’s just past 8 a.m. and the family of six – including a 1-year-old baby boy – already is curled up at the lip of the opium pipe.

Beg, 65, breathes in and exhales a cloud of smoke. He passes the pipe to his wife. She passes it to their daughter. The daughter blows the opium smoke into the baby’s tiny mouth. The baby’s eyes roll back into his head.

I haven’t reported on this kind of thing, but Dexter Filkins of The Times has and it is pretty grim no matter how you slice it.

With everything else that is wrong with this place, I have no idea how you even begin to approach a problem of this scope. Combating addiction on a large scale is hard enough without a full-on insurgency raging, endemic poverty, malnutrition, widespread illiteracy and corrupt, incompetent leadership. Just ask the US DEA. But with all of these factors, addiction is just one more unsolvable problem in a country that seems to specialize in them.

Here in Kabul, there are addiction treatment centers and I hear good things about them. But out in the provinces, they barely have basics like rice and clean water. On the list of things that these places need, and soon, rehab is way down on the list.