Lessons for Fighting the Afghan Narcotics Trade
Selling poppies is easier than selling diamonds and gold in Afghanistan, and just as valuable,” an official in the Afghan Ministry of Public Health told me in 2011. “The [police] is corrupt, the farmer is poor, and the addict always buys.”
He was right. The failure of international forces in Afghanistan to curb the narcotics trade presents one of the gravest threats to the country’s long-term stability and security. Even though the U.S.-led coalition has spent more than $6 billion on stopping drug shipments, creating incentives for farmers to exchange poppies for other crops, and disrupting illicit financial networks over the past decade, Afghanistan remains the world’s largest supplier of heroin and other illegal opiates.
In NATO countries alone, Afghan narcotics cause more than 10,000 heroin-overdose deaths per year — making them far deadlier than the munitions that have claimed the lives of approximately 3,200 coalition personnel since the start of the war. Meanwhile, needle-sharing among intravenous drug users has led to an explosion of HIV infections from the Russian heartland to communities in the Baltics and Eastern Europe. The Afghan drug trade presents a unique threat to international security, since it has created unlikely bedfellows out of ideologically divergent terrorist organizations, such as Hezbollah, which has its hands in narcotics transport and financing from Lebanon to South America, and the Taliban, which controls production.
As Iran’s experience shows, the only way to drive down drug use and contain its negative effects is to focus on prevention and treatment.
Within Afghanistan, the drug trade provides the funding for the ongoing insurgency and perpetuates a culture of impunity and corruption — major impediments to the establishment of good governance and a healthy civil society. Furthermore, from a public health standpoint, the skyrocketing rate of drug addiction there has created a potentially insurmountable challenge for the central government. A 2010 study by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported that roughly one million Afghans between the ages of 15 and 64 are addicted to narcotics, up from 860,000 in 2005. Afghanistan’s eight percent addiction rate among adults is twice as high as the global average.
Most troubling, Afghans are turning to intravenous drug use in large numbers — heroin use increased by 140 percent between 2005 and 2010 alone. This raises the risk of lethal blood-borne diseases, including HIV/AIDS and hepatitis, which can be transmitted through shared needles. Left unchecked, Afghanistan’s growing HIV outbreak has the potential to upend the gains made since the Taliban era in limiting the death caused by infectious diseases.
Since the U.S.-led antinarcotics efforts have made scant progress, it is time for Afghanistan to look to other models. As it turns out, neighboring Iran’s failures and successes in reducing both the demand for drugs and the harm they cause offer a good example.
HOW TO STOP A PLAGUE
For much of the twentieth century, Iran’s strategy for curbing drug addiction looked a lot like Afghanistan’s current one: stopping the flow of narcotics and destroying crops. When, in the early 1970s, it became clear that this method wasn’t working, Iranian authorities adopted policies that focused more on prevention and treatment, with promising results.
But the 1979 revolution changed all that, and the Islamic government it brought to power implemented strict zero-tolerance narcotics laws. The regime, which saw drug use not as a medical or public health issue but as a moral shortcoming, believed that addiction and abuse could be beaten out of the public through punitive measures. Penalties for addicts included fining, imprisonment, and physical punishment; drug dealers and smugglers were often considered to be “at war with God” and executed. By the late 1980s, the government was sending thousands of addicts to prison camps, where they were supposed to detoxify and atone for their sins through forced labor.
These draconian social measures against drug users and dealers were matched with similarly aggressive operations to prevent the flow of opiates across the border from Afghanistan. By the late 1980s, an estimated 50 percent of Afghan opiate production was passing through Iranian territory, and the Iranian markets were flooded with Afghan opium, heroin, and morphine. Starting in the early 1990s, Tehran constructed more than 260 kilometers of static defenses — including concrete dams that blocked mountain passes, anti-vehicle berms, trenches, minefields, forts, and mountain towers — at a cost of over $80 million. By the late 1990s, more than 100,000 police officers, army troops, and Revolutionary Guardsmen were committed to antinarcotic operations.
Yet both the social policies and the border fortifications were fruitless. Although the Iranian authorities seized nearly eight times the amount of narcotics in 1999 than they had in 1990, they could not keep up with the expansion of Afghan opium production, which rose in those years from approximately 1,500 metric tons to roughly 4,500. Iran also found that the number of intravenous drug users was growing. Ironically, the prisons and camps where addicts were expected to kick their habits became epicenters of drug use, in which people learned how to inject heroin and shared primitive infection-prone needles.
