Is This the Price of Freedom?

Is This the Price of Freedom? ; HEROIN IN KABUL Five Years after the Invasion of Afghanistan, the Country's Opium Poppies Provide 90 per Cent of the World's Heroin, and There Are 40,000 Addicts in Kabul Alone

By Report Jacques Menasche Photographs Stephen Dupont
Newspaper _article from The Independent (London, England)

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In the middle of Kabul there's an alley behind a destroyed supermarket, and the alley is a toilet. Really a toilet. A seven- year-old is selling pink tissue paper. It's been raining and the torn-off pieces dot the mud like confetti. Descending through a tunnel of debris,we find ourselves in the courtyard of what used to be a house, a pit the size of a boxing ring. Now there's rubbish and faeces and rusty nails. Only the roof is left, a twisted ribcage of crossbeam logs, its collapse making a kind of cave.

"Here are the addict people," Najibullah says. Dr Najibullah, a psychiatrist working with the UN's Office of Drugs and Crime team, is our Virgil through Kabul's drugs underworld.

Inside the cave, the morning light slants through a triangular aperture, revealing two young men squatting in the semi-darkness. They look nothing alike - one dark-skinned and weathered' the other more fair, Western looking - but they are actually brothers.

They don't seem to mind our presence and quickly set about their business. First Hussein, the younger of the two, holds a cat-food tin over a burning cigarette pack to boil the heroin and lemon juice. Then Reza sucks the liquid into two syringes and lays them out on top of a spiral notebook. Next the brothers take turns shooting each other up. Finally they let the needles simply dangle from their outstretched arms and remain that way, eyes closed, frozen in a fearful symmetry.

It would be obscene to glamorise this squalid scene - the rubble cave, the cigarette butts and debris in the dirt, the human stench, the dirty finger nails - but there's a fraternal intimacy in the way they share the ritual, in the soft banter between them' and it's there, too, when 10 minutes later they stumble groggily back into the alley and brush themselves down, their hands gently patting each other's backs, scattering dust.

Meanwhile, not 100 feet overhead, helicopters roar by. It turns out they're part of the security for George Bush,who happens to be at the palace on his first trip to Afghanistan at the very moment we're here in this alley, on the dark side of democracy, in the ravaged Old City where you can score opium, hash, crystal meth and, for just a few pence, enough heroin to stay high all day.

For days now, everyone I've talked to has been stoned. I've got used to it' the sleepy monotone, the downcast eyes, and the slow, staggered responses to my questions. Dutifully, the addicts line up for interrogation.

At first Hussein is just another one. Through Najibullah I learn that he's 21, grew up in Iran, and that he and his brother have been back in Afghanistan about a year.

Then I ask him why he started and he looks up.

"I was in love," he declares.

Najibullah clarifies. "He was in love with a girl ... after that, when he lost this girl ..."

"The girl left him and he started?" I ask. Instead of waiting for the translation, though, Hussein pushes up his coat sleeve to reveal the tattoo on his arm. It's a girl's face.

"Here. This is her picture," Najibullah says, holding Hussein's arm out in a doctorly way for my inspection. The portrait looks like a child's drawing. Beneath it is a caption in Dari that Najibullah translates. It says: "We are strangers in a strange land."

"What's her name?" I ask Hussein.

"Pari," he says quietly. Then, for a brief moment silence falls over the alley. Hussein says something else to Najibullah, who nods and then turns to me: "He lost her' it's about six years that she suicided."

"She killed herself?"

"Yes," he says flatly. "That girl's parents didn't like her to marry with him. She suicided because she was separated from him. She suicided, and he used heroin."

"She was 14,"Reza, Hussein's brother, adds. A crowd has begun to gather, so the doctor starts to usher us out of the alley. …