by Hasan Mansoor
Cheap Pakistani heroin is the curse of Rubina Naz’s life. Her marriage to a violent and abusive addict, during which she had to work to feed their four children, ended when he died of AIDS — but not before he infected her with the HIV virus.
“Such a huge punishment without doing anything wrong crushed me,” said 28-year-old Naz as she sat in a Karachi hospital.
She was 16 years old when her labourer father married her off to Ghulam Punjtan, then an apparently respectable driver for the Pakistani government.
“A few months after the marriage I discovered Ghulam was a heroin user. I tried to help him kick the habit but all I got were beatings and abuse,” she said.
Pakistan has more than four million drug addicts in its population of 170 million, according to figures compiled by the country’s Anti-Narcotics Force, which is responsible for investigating and prosecuting drug offences.
Opium poppy is grown on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, a region infamous as a hideout for Taliban and Al-Qaeda extremists and branded the most dangerous place in the world for Americans by US President Barack Obama.
Pakistan shares a 2,500-kilometre (1,560-mile) porous border with Afghanistan, which supplies 90 percent of the opium used to make heroin worldwide.
As such, the largely lawless region is the key transit point for heroin, morphine and hashish heading west to Iran, Turkey, the Balkans and Europe, and east to China.
As it passes through what has become the central theatre of the “war on terror,” cheap supplies are left behind for the locals, with one gram costing as little as 80 rupees (one dollar) in Karachi, the southern port on the Arabian Sea and Pakistan’s commercial hub.
Here anyone can afford a hit. And many, like Rubina Naz’s husband, do.
Her life lurched from bad to worse as her husband’s addiction spun out of control. When he lost his job, she took factory work to ensure the family had an income.
“My husband fell seriously ill three years ago. His father took him to a hospital where tests confirmed him HIV positive,” she said.
But her in-laws didn’t tell Rubina about the disease, and she continued to have sex with her husband. Weeks after he died, she fell ill and was diagnosed HIV positive.
Pakistan’s chronically underfunded and crumbling health system offers little help for drug users to conquer addiction — let alone deal with its devastating consequences.
Because of the enormous quantities of drugs that pass through the country, abuse and addiction are on the rise, without the health services and anti-drugs squads needed to adequately combat the scourge.
Pakistan’s understaffed and under-equipped Anti-Narcotics Force has around 2,000 personnel policing the snaking mountainous border with Afghanistan and the 900 kilometres (563 miles) it shares with Iran, the main smuggling routes.
Border control duties are shared with paramilitary troops already struggling with a deadly counter-insurgency campaign in the tribal belt.
“Even though the challenges facing a transit country like Pakistan are increasing with every passing day, the resources available to counter the threat of narcotics continue to remain meager,” the Force said in a report.
The majority of drug users in Pakistan smoke hashish, experts say. Heroin, alcohol, tranquillisers and pain killers are the other most common drugs.
A joint study released last year by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and the Paris Pact Initiative, an international partnership to counter trafficking and consumption of Afghan opiates, found that trafficking of Afghan opiates through Pakistan towards lucrative markets abroad is on the rise.
Seizures are also on the rise, it said — but both figures just reflect an increase in the cultivate of poppy in Afghanistan.
“Trafficking of opiates into and through Pakistan increased dramatically during the period 2001-2006 corresponding roughly to the increase in opium production in Afghanistan from 185 metric tons in 2001 to 6,100 metric tons in 2006,” the report said.
In 2005, Pakistan seized 24 tonnes of heroin and morphine, accounting for 27 percent of total seizures worldwide, it said, adding that in 2006, that figure leapt to a record 35 tonnes.
UN experts have said that the easy availability of narcotics is compounded by general ignorance among Pakistanis about the consequences of taking them.
A report earlier this decade found that more than 80 percent of Pakistanis did not believe narcotics to be harmful, and that many addicts were introduced to drugs by friends and relatives.
One of those who learnt the hard way was 25-year-old Shabana.
Introduced to heroin by classmates, she thought it was fantastic, she said.
It quickly took over her life as she graduated from smoking to sniffing and, finally, injecting. She lost weight, dropped out of college, and her family abandoned her.
“I began to take drugs with my friends for fun, but as time passed it became a matter of life and death,” she said, refusing to give her full name.
A photograph of her a few years ago shows a tall girl with fair skin and striking features — barely recognisable as the girl now lying on a bed in a Karachi rehabilitation centre.
“I started smoking heroin-filled cigarettes and found myself in heaven,” she said.
Only an older brother saved her from the hell that addiction can leads to.
“My brother brought me here for rehabilitation. For me he is more than my father. I will not take drugs again, I will not let him down,” she said.
Cheap Pakistani heroin is the curse of Rubina Naz’s life. Her marriage to a violent and abusive addict, during which she had to work to feed their four children, ended when he died of AIDS — but not before he infected her with the HIV virus.“Such a huge punishment without doing anything wrong crushed me,” said 28-year-old Naz as she sat in a Karachi hospital.
She was 16 years old when her labourer father married her off to Ghulam Punjtan, then an apparently respectable driver for the Pakistani government.
“A few months after the marriage I discovered Ghulam was a heroin user. I tried to help him kick the habit but all I got were beatings and abuse,” she said.
Pakistan has more than four million drug addicts in its population of 170 million, according to figures compiled by the country’s Anti-Narcotics Force, which is responsible for investigating and prosecuting drug offences.
Opium poppy is grown on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, a region infamous as a hideout for Taliban and Al-Qaeda extremists and branded the most dangerous place in the world for Americans by US President Barack Obama.
Pakistan shares a 2,500-kilometre (1,560-mile) porous border with Afghanistan, which supplies 90 percent of the opium used to make heroin worldwide.
As such, the largely lawless region is the key transit point for heroin, morphine and hashish heading west to Iran, Turkey, the Balkans and Europe, and east to China.
As it passes through what has become the central theatre of the “war on terror,” cheap supplies are left behind for the locals, with one gram costing as little as 80 rupees (one dollar) in Karachi, the southern port on the Arabian Sea and Pakistan’s commercial hub.
Here anyone can afford a hit. And many, like Rubina Naz’s husband, do.
Her life lurched from bad to worse as her husband’s addiction spun out of control. When he lost his job, she took factory work to ensure the family had an income.
“My husband fell seriously ill three years ago. His father took him to a hospital where tests confirmed him HIV positive,” she said.
But her in-laws didn’t tell Rubina about the disease, and she continued to have sex with her husband. Weeks after he died, she fell ill and was diagnosed HIV positive.
Pakistan’s chronically underfunded and crumbling health system offers little help for drug users to conquer addiction — let alone deal with its devastating consequences.
Because of the enormous quantities of drugs that pass through the country, abuse and addiction are on the rise, without the health services and anti-drugs squads needed to adequately combat the scourge.
Pakistan’s understaffed and under-equipped Anti-Narcotics Force has around 2,000 personnel policing the snaking mountainous border with Afghanistan and the 900 kilometres (563 miles) it shares with Iran, the main smuggling routes.
Border control duties are shared with paramilitary troops already struggling with a deadly counter-insurgency campaign in the tribal belt.
“Even though the challenges facing a transit country like Pakistan are increasing with every passing day, the resources available to counter the threat of narcotics continue to remain meager,” the Force said in a report.
The majority of drug users in Pakistan smoke hashish, experts say. Heroin, alcohol, tranquillisers and pain killers are the other most common drugs.
A joint study released last year by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and the Paris Pact Initiative, an international partnership to counter trafficking and consumption of Afghan opiates, found that trafficking of Afghan opiates through Pakistan towards lucrative markets abroad is on the rise.
Seizures are also on the rise, it said — but both figures just reflect an increase in the cultivate of poppy in Afghanistan.
“Trafficking of opiates into and through Pakistan increased dramatically during the period 2001-2006 corresponding roughly to the increase in opium production in Afghanistan from 185 metric tons in 2001 to 6,100 metric tons in 2006,” the report said.
In 2005, Pakistan seized 24 tonnes of heroin and morphine, accounting for 27 percent of total seizures worldwide, it said, adding that in 2006, that figure leapt to a record 35 tonnes.
UN experts have said that the easy availability of narcotics is compounded by general ignorance among Pakistanis about the consequences of taking them.
A report earlier this decade found that more than 80 percent of Pakistanis did not believe narcotics to be harmful, and that many addicts were introduced to drugs by friends and relatives.
One of those who learnt the hard way was 25-year-old Shabana.
Introduced to heroin by classmates, she thought it was fantastic, she said.
It quickly took over her life as she graduated from smoking to sniffing and, finally, injecting. She lost weight, dropped out of college, and her family abandoned her.
“I began to take drugs with my friends for fun, but as time passed it became a matter of life and death,” she said, refusing to give her full name.
A photograph of her a few years ago shows a tall girl with fair skin and striking features — barely recognisable as the girl now lying on a bed in a Karachi rehabilitation centre.
“I started smoking heroin-filled cigarettes and found myself in heaven,” she said.
Only an older brother saved her from the hell that addiction can leads to.
“My brother brought me here for rehabilitation. For me he is more than my father. I will not take drugs again, I will not let him down,” she said.
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