Milk of Paradise

by Lucy Inglis

  In the north of Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Massoud established the moderate Northern Alliance in protest against the Taliban’s occupation. The Northern Alliance became the de facto government of the country since no other viable option was available.

  Afghanistan began to break all records for opium production, year upon year. The only year it was checked was 2000–1, when Mullah Omar put in place a ban and decreed that farmers plough up their fields, declaring the poppy ‘un-Islamic’. He relented for the 2002 season, however, and it is widely suspected that the ban was not in fact a matter of spiritual conscience, but to ensure they did not flood the market. In north-east Badakhshan, home to Marco Polo’s poppies and Massoud, poppy cultivation remained static. After that, poppy production in the country continued to climb steeply again, until in 2006–7 it was estimated that Afghanistan was supplying over 90 per cent of the world’s heroin, cultivated on land whose area was more than that of all the land used for coca cultivation in Latin America. Various well-meaning outside influences have tried to decrease the amount of opium poppy being grown through alternative means, such as the British offers of compensation to poppy farmers in the late 1990s, which just meant that the farmers planted more in order to receive more compensation.

  However, by late 2007, after year-on-year rises in total production, it had become clear that there was a divide in Afghanistan, and in more ways that one. In the north, despite the problems and the poverty, opium production had remained low-level and static, or had diminished. The UN attributed this to ‘leadership, incentives and security [which] have led farmers to turn their back on opium’.17 With the collapse of the Soviet Union into fifteen countries in 1991, the Russian threat to Afghanistan was instantly reduced, and borders opened up, presenting opportunity for the drugs traffickers of Afghanistan to send their product north. Russia had been relatively untroubled by a domestic heroin problem, but in the eighteen months after the collapse of the USSR they saw a ninefold increase in heroin addicts. New HIV infection rates doubled every year from 1995 to 2001, along with hepatitis and drug-resistant tuberculosis, coinciding with the Taliban’s output, and now 1.3 million of the population are estimated to be heroin addicts.18 Afghanistan is taking its revenge on Russia.

  In south-west Afghanistan, despite relatively higher levels of income, opium cultivation rose to unprecedented levels. The Durand Line runs through the most densely planted series of poppy fields in the world, and in 2007, 70 per cent of the poppies in Afghanistan were grown along the border, and more than half of the whole poppy crop came from Helmand.

  United States Invasion of Afghanistan

  The US and British invasion of Afghanistan on 7 October 2001, in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks and the suspected harbouring of Osama bin Laden by the Taliban, came hard on the heels of the Taliban’s complete ban on opium farming during the previous two seasons. The Western forces succeeded in defeating the Taliban, and in doing so they not only marched into a war, but into a crisis situation where people could not feed their children or seek medical care because they had made no money for two seasons. Many of them were deeply in debt to the Taliban drug traders, and desperate. Sandeep Chawla, head of research at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), said ‘in drug control terms it was an unprecedented success, but in humanitarian terms it was a major disaster’.19 In addition, the shortage led to heroin stocks being adulterated to keep up supply, and the accompanying drop in purity resulted in high numbers of deaths in Iran and Estonia.

  In late 2001, at a conference in Bonn, the United Kingdom was charged with overseeing Afghanistan’s counter-narcotics efforts. From 2001 onwards, there was a boom in poppy production. Eradication attempts by NATO soldiers led not only to ill feeling between Afghan farmers and the invaders, but only worsened living conditions and were unsuccessful in the long term as poppy production only increased overall. The Taliban regime had improved the roads and the NATO intervention led to improved infrastructure. Many of the Taliban and al-Qaeda were never captured because they couldn’t be identified, and simply carried on in the opium trade. Afghanistan is also now the world’s largest supplier of cannabis.20

  The futility of this situation is obvious in the reports from the UNODC: ‘In 2007, Afghanistan cultivated 193,000 hectares of opium poppies, an increase of 17 per cent over last year . . . Afghanistan’s opium production has thus reached a frighteningly new level, twice the amount produced just two years ago.’21 The eradication attempt stood at 19,047 hectares in total. Eradication attempts have continued since, and, alarmed by the jump in poppy cultivation, the US devised a spraying eradication programme for the spring harvest of 2008, such as Agent Orange (chemical) or Agent Green (biological). These agents had been used both in the Vietnam War, and to eradicate coca fields in Colombia in 2000. Both had caused severe health problems, particularly in children, and they never went ahead in Afghanistan.

  There have been attempts to provide Alternative Livelihood programmes, such as Food Zone, which operated in Helmand from 2008 to 2012, encouraging the use of greenhouses to grow year-round crops that will sustain families, as well as wheat, saffron, black cumin and licorice, although its limited success may be to do with the concept of applying ‘milestones and key performance indicators’ to Afghan villagers.22 The failure of the programmes is apparent in the 2014 UNODC report showing at least 224,000 hectares under poppy cultivation, an increase of 7 per cent on the previous year, with eradication going down by 63 per cent. The farm-gate prices and export quality of this heroin are also going down, the heroin falling to 52 per cent pure in 2014.23 This is leading dealers to adulterate their heroin before it reaches the end user, so that there is enough of a hit to keep them coming back. Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid first produced in 1959 by Paul Janssen in Beerse, Belgium, is an extremely powerful drug estimated to be up to fifty times stronger than heroin, and is currently the most dangerous adulterant commonly used by dealers.

  Even since then, genetically modified poppies and investment in irrigation and farming techniques, as well as changes in climate, have seen farmers able to grow more per year. The seeds are believed to originate in China, although the farmers buy them locally so are unsure of the origin. This has resulted, in 2016, in a 43 per cent rise in opium tonnage from 2015, from less land. The figures are stunning.24

  Meanwhile, NATO forces were still fighting insurgents. In 2014, Western forces withdrew, almost, although have kept a presence in Helmand. Camp Bastion was a British army airbase located just north-west of Lashkar Gar, and the largest of its kind, able to hold 32,000 personnel, with a full-tented and solid field hospital.

  Between 2006 and 2014, it gained an ‘international reputation as the world’s leading field hospital. It was this province that saw some of the fiercest fighting of the invasion.’25 Camp Bastion was an ambitious project in the middle of a major deployment, and also marked a modification in combat medicine since the Gulf War, which still used MASH. The many developments in field medicine made in the Gulf War contributed to making Camp Bastion what it was, but the last MASH team – the 212th – was retired in 2006, and now casualties in the field depend on fully equipped Humvees containing forward surgical teams, the FSTs.

  The medical personnel involved in both the Gulf conflicts and Afghanistan have since made notable contributions to civilian trauma care, particularly in the treatment of patients involved in car accidents, and also burns and gunshot wounds. At the hospital, 75 per cent of all cases were blast wounds from improvised explosive devices (IEDs), leading to advances not only in amputation, but in before and aftercare. Levels of post-traumatic stress disorder involved with these injuries are significantly reduced with sufficient pain medication and treatment within one hour, known as the Golden Hour. To this end, medics in the field used fentanyl lollipops in cases of severe injury. The reduction of pain is almost instantaneous, and unlike intravenous opioids, if the user passes out or becomes slack-jawed, the stick causes it to fall out. Anecdotally, British an
d US medics differ in that the US medics will tape the stick to the casualty’s thumb, so that it is not lost or dropped, and so it will definitely fall from the mouth to prevent a potential overdose.

  Camp Bastion also made strides forward in the treatment of children with severe trauma. Eighty-five children in total were admitted. The average age was eight. Fifty-three had battle-related injuries, around half of which were caused by IEDs. The others were mainly burns sustained in the home and car accidents.26 Civilians also brought in their children for smaller injuries not requiring admission. A Camp Bastion surgeon, interviewed for this book, said that the children of Helmand have a high threshold for pain medication, and for opiates in particular. It seems no one in Afghanistan escapes the poppy.

  The distasteful truth of the situation, in the two prime poppy-growing centres of the world, is that Western interference and demand has created an industry that refuses to be crushed. And there is no sign of peace in Afghanistan. The talibs, who believe they are inheriting a second golden age – now made of dust and catastrophe – have a complicated and uneasy relationship with poppy farming, but want the money to fund their wars. Now their rivals ISIS – the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), or Daesh in Arabic – tax the farmers on their captured territories with amoral relentlessness. Both factions are products of this interference, and both know the importance of the illegal industry under their control. The UN’s attempts to eradicate Afghanistan’s poppies have had the opposite effect: in times of war, food poverty and instability, opium production only increases. People may smuggle and deal in heroin to get rich; people farm the poppy to survive.

  ISIS are a group of Sunni Muslims who follow the fundamentalist teachings of the Saudi Arabian tradition of Wahhabism. Wahhabism emerged on the Arabian peninsula in the eighteenth century, founded by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an ultraconservative religious leader who wanted to return to the glory days of the old, austere caliphates, when the Muslim Empire stretched as far as Spain. Many in the upper echelons of the organization are former officers from Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army. They emerged as a coherent organization in 2014 and began to seize towns near major supply routes, a lesson they had learned from the Taliban, and pressed forwards to consolidate their holdings on the Iraqi–Syrian border. ISIS is one of the richest terror groups in history. After its first year alone, the dozen oil fields it had captured were estimated to be bringing in more than $1 million per day.27 It also deals in weapons that it has stolen from Iraqi and Syrian military compounds. Lastly, it deals in drugs. This also is an inheritance from the Taliban. In 2008, the then head of the Drugs Enforcement Agency (DEA) compared the Taliban’s close ties with the opium farmers and smugglers to the Farc’s involvement in the Nicaraguan cocaine business. And it seems that ISIS is keen to copy the Farc’s success. Much of the cocaine that arrives in Europe comes across the Atlantic on what is known as Highway 10, running along the 10th parallel. Over the last ten years, Mali and Niger have been destabilized by infighting, allowing the local branches of al-Qaeda to smuggle cocaine more easily through these countries. Now, Boko Haram, the African Islamist group, has taken over the ancient trading routes through these countries, combining drug smuggling with rape and kidnap as it seeks to control the flow of drugs and money by any means necessary. To the east, Afghan drug lords have their own equivalent of Highway 10, known as the Southern Route. With land routes to the north becoming more difficult, particularly as European borders close, the best way out is by sea.

  North Africa and Egypt have traditionally been gateways to Europe for both cocaine and heroin, particularly Afghan heroin, after it was trekked across Saudi Arabia by camel. During the Egyptian heroin crisis of the late 1920s, things became so bad that the Camel Corps installed an X-ray machine to check if camels were being used to smuggle opium in metal containers that had been pushed down their throats. Now, ISIS actively refines opium into heroin before it is moved, and then drives it out. One side effect of ISIS refining more heroin inside the borders of Afghanistan has been a nationwide boom in the number of heroin addicts. Those in rural areas, with their higher tolerance for opiates, are particularly affected. In 2015, the UNODC estimated that there were 3 million addicts, making up 12 per cent of the population: the highest rate of addiction in the world. The heroin that does go for export moves through Iran and Pakistan, down to the Makran Coast of Balochistan. Then it is loaded onto small, seagoing dhows and motored across to Somalia, destined eventually for Uganda and Kenya. The Combined Maritime Forces (CMF), consisting of thirty-one nations who patrol the area, cannot arrest or detain the sailors, so the drugs are dumped at sea and the smugglers released. The chances of being caught are negligible, and CMF powers mean that there is no risk of imprisonment. Hezbollah and al-Shabaab also take their share of the profits from this route. Entebbe airport in Uganda has become a major heroin hub, where human mules desperate for money swallow up to a hundred heroin parcels before making the journey to the airport. Some fly with the drugs inside them; others wait for them to pass through their systems, before washing them and handing them over to a smuggler further up the chain who stockpiles them. The superintendent of Uganda’s anti-narcotics department, Tinka Zaragaba, knows that they are fighting a losing battle, only discovering twenty kilos last year: ‘It can be put in the breasts of women, it can be put in their private parts in the form of pads . . . [there are] very many ways of concealment.’28

  In 2015, a 1,032-kg shipment of heroin was discovered in a dhow off Mombasa, East Africa’s largest ever haul. The figures had been rising steadily since 2010, indicating that was the time the Middle Eastern groups began to dominate and encourage the Southern Route. There were also large shipments of acetic anhydride, used to refine heroin, going from East Africa towards the Golden Triangle and Crescent. Whilst it is a widely used chemical reagent, a sudden rise in supply along the route indicated to the CMF a distinct rise in heroin traffic. The CMF and other authorities turned their attention to the waters off East Africa, which has led to the Arab groups looking for somewhere else to land their cargoes. Hence why more and more heroin is also coming into South Africa since 2015, as the Southern Route utilizes as much of Africa’s vast and porous coastline as possible, often called the Smack Track. The local cities are seeing the typical rise in drug use along any trafficking route. HIV infections from intravenous use are rising, and low-grade heroin and marijuana mixtures, known as nyaope or whoonga, are causing dramatic social problems around Johannesburg and Durban. All of this is caused by the trade in Afghan heroin.

  ISIS, like the Taliban before it, needs to control its territory to keep the revenue from these three sources coming in. It plies its fighters endlessly with amphetamines, and in 2017 more than 11 million pills were seized at the Syrian border, destined for ISIS fighters.29

  ISIS also bears more than a passing resemblance to the Mughal king Babur’s idea of how to rule, remaining endlessly mobile over a vast amount of land, resources and peoples. Unlike the Mughals, though, it uses instability and terror to keep the people in check and the money coming in. The ISIS claims to be willing to pay any price for a pure Muslim faith for countries such as Afghanistan are belied by its exploitation of the same people, keeping them in such fear that crops and taxes are handed over willingly. The escalating drug problem also plays into the jihadists’ hands, with a pliable and ever-rising number of addicts. As the ISIS structure comes to mimic those of Mexico in terms of sophisticated military organization, control of social media, and fraternization with other gangs in the same territory, its power is unlikely to be undermined. It will only be by breaking its hold on oil and opium that its stranglehold can be broken.

  In a meeting with a young Afghan from Nangarhar province, I asked him what he thought of ISIS. He shrugged with typical Afghan understatement. ‘Nothing much. My uncle is Taliban, so they leave us alone. Bad for women though.’ Nangarhar, close to the Durand Line, is both a centre for farming o
pium and a conduit for passing it out to Pakistan.

  ‘What do your family do there?’ I asked.

  He guessed that I already knew the answer as he replied, ‘Oh, they’re farmers.’

  ‘And do they grow poppies?’

  ‘Sure. Who doesn’t?’ came the deliberately guileless response.

  Most Afghans resent the ISIS occupation, just as they loathed the British and Russian ones, but it is a situation they have become used to over two centuries of invaders. As always, they will continue to farm opium as long as it is more profitable than something else.

  Chapter Ten

  HEROIN CHIC, HIV AND GENERATION OXY

  ‘I owe it my perfect hours.’1 Jean Cocteau

  Jean Cocteau was born in 1889 and became addicted to opium in London in 1904, after a twenty-day bout of neuralgia. ‘It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheerless; and a duller spectacle of this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London,’ he recalled in his memoir of addiction, when a bored and tired druggist dispensed him some opium gum on Oxford Street, only yards from where Thomas De Quincey first purchased his laudanum over a century before.