Afghanistan's female opium users lift veil on their addictions
KABUL—Anita lifted the sky-blue burqa from her face, revealing glazed eyes and cracked lips from years of smoking opium, and touched her saggy belly, still round from giving birth to her seventh child a month ago.
“I can’t give breast milk to my baby,” said the 32-year-old Anita, who like other women interviewed for this story, declined to give her full name. “I’m scared he’ll get addicted.
She was huddled with other women at the United Nations-funded Nejat drug rehabilitation centre in Kabul’s old quarter, having sneaked out of her home to avoid being stopped by her husband from going outside alone.
With little funding and no access to substitution drugs such as methadone, treatment is rudimentary at Nejat for a problem that is growing in a dirt-poor country riven by conflicts for more than three decades.
Afghanistan is the source for more than 90 per cent of the world’s opium, which is used to make heroin, and more of it is being grown than ever before.