Now in power, Taliban sets sights on Afghan drug underworld

Now the uncontested autocrats of Afghanistan, the Taliban has set its sights on stamping out the scourge of anesthetics dependence, indeed if by force.

At evening, the battle- hardened fighters- turned- bobbies comb the capital’s medicine- destroyed demiworld. Below Kabul’s bustling megacity islands, amid piles of scrap and aqueducts of unprintable water, hundreds of homeless men addicted to heroin and methamphetamines are rounded up, beaten and forcefully taken to treatment centres.
The Associated Press gained rare access to one similar raid last week.

The scene handed a window into the new order under Taliban governance The men – numerous with internal illness, according to croakers – sat against gravestone walls with their hands tied. They were told to sober up or face beatings.
The heavy-handed styles are ate by some health workers, who have had no choice but to acclimatize to Taliban rule. “ We aren’t in a republic presently, this is a absolutism. And the use of force is the only way to treat these people,” said Dr Fazalrabi Mayar, working in a treatment installation. He was pertaining specifically to Afghans addicted to heroin and meth.

Soon after the Taliban took power on August 15, the Taliban health ministry issued an order to these installations, emphasizing their intention to rigorously control the problem of dependence, croakers said.
Fuzzy- eyed and cadaverous, the detained encompass a diapason of Afghan lives hollowed out by the country’s tumultuous history of war, irruption and hunger. They were muses, dogfaces, merchandisers, growers.

Afghanistan’s vast poppy fields are the source of utmost of the world’s heroin, and the country has surfaced as a significant meth patron. Both have fuelled massive dependence around the country.
The lawless opium trade is intertwined with Afghanistan’s frugality and its fermentation. Poppy farmers are part of an important pastoral constituency for the Taliban, and utmost calculate on the crop to make ends meet.

Intimately, the Taliban has always denied links to the medicine trade. It also enforced the only largely successful ban on opium product, between 2000-2001, before the US irruption. Consecutive governments have failed to do the same.
On a recent evening, Taliban fighters raided a medicine den under a ground in the Guzargah area of Kabul. With lines for lashes and slung rifles, they ordered the group of men out of their fusty diggings. Some came staggering out, others were forced to the ground. The unforeseen clinking of lighters followed another order to hand over things; the men preferred to use up all the medicines they held before they were sequestered.

One man struck a match beneath a piece of antipode, his sunken cheeks heightening as he smelled in the bank. He goggled blankly into the distance.
Another man was reticent. “ They’re vitamins!” he contended.

Taliban fighter Qari Fedayee was tying up the hands of another.
“ They’re our countrymen, they’re our family and there are good people inside of them,” he said. “ God willing, the people in the sanitarium will be good with them and cure them.”

An senior, bespectacled man raised his voice. He’s a minstrel, he blazoned, and if they let him go he’ll noway use medicines again. He scribbled verses on a piece of paper to prove his point. It didn’t work.
What drove him to medicines? “ Some effects aren’t meant to be told,” he replied.

In the end, they were at least 150 men rounded up. They were taken to the quarter police station, where all their things – medicines, holdalls, shanks, rings, lighters, a juice box – were burned in a pile since they’re interdicted to take them to the treatment centre. As the men squinched hard, a Taliban officer watched the awards of bank, counting prayer globules.
By night, they were taken to the Avicenna Medical Hospital for Drug Treatment, on the edges of Kabul. Once a military base, Camp Phoenix, established by the US army in 2003, it was made into a medicine treatment centre in 2016. Now it’s Kabul’s largest, able of accommodating people.

The men are stripped and bathed. Their heads are shaved.
Then, a 45- day treatment programme begins, said Dr Wahedullah Koshan, the head psychiatrist. They will suffer pullout with only some medical care to palliate discomfort and pain.

Koshan conceded the sanitarium lacks the indispensable opioids, buprenorphine and methadone, generally used to treat heroin dependence. His staff haven’t been paid since July, but he said the health ministry promised hires would be forthcoming.
The Taliban has broader points. “ This is just the morning, latterly we will go after the growers, and we will discipline them according to Sharia law,” said lead command officer Qari Ghafoor.