New Highs for Afghan Drug Production – Easy when the Empire stands guard.
New Highs forWith authorities concentrating on Afghanistan’s substantial trade in opium, officials admit there is not the time, money or inclination to worry as much about the production of hashish, which the United Nations warns is climbing.
Disheveled and blind in one eye, the 57-year-old hashish dealer has no fear that police might try to stop the trade he conducts from a petrol station on the edge of the dirty Kabul River, AFP reported.
“If you give them 100 afghani (two dollars) and a joint, they would say carry on,“ said the man who gives his name as Mahtaabudin.
“I am not afraid of anyone,“ he said gruffly, only agreeing to talk after he has lit a cigarette of heady hashish made from cannabis resin which he shares with some of his customers on the station’s verandah.
He admits to some precautions, such as only selling to people he knows, but Mahtaabudin probably does not really need to be too careful.
And anyway, Afghan security forces, especially the police, are notorious users of the drug.
“I don’t know how many but there are people using hashish working with army and other organizations,“ said deputy counter narcotics minister Mohammad Zafar.
“We have a big problem with opium poppy. This is why we don’t have good data as regards hashish.“
Afghanistan produces more than 90 percent of the world’s opium, most of it refined into heroin inside the country, an enterprise that earns the extremist Taliban millions of dollars a year for their insurgency against the government.
It is also the world’s second largest source of cannabis resin, producing 1,603 metric tons in 2006 after Morocco’s 1,915 tons, according to the UN’s World Drug Report 2008.
The latest UN drug survey in 2005 said 2.2 percent of the population, which it put at 23.8 million, use hashish compared to 0.7 percent for alcohol, 0.6 percent for opium and 0.2 percent for heroin.
The numbers are believed to be considerably higher today with officials regularly warning of growing drug use.
