David Pratt: From Kabul to the Clyde ... heroin knows no borders

Huddled in groups, often with blankets over their heads, they smoke or inject the heroin that blights the lives of so many addicts both in Afghanistan and much further afield.

Last month, while on Kabul’s streets, I had a chance encounter with a few of those men whose lives have been changed by the drug. I say men, even though growing evidence shows that women in Afghanistan, too, are increasingly caught up in the country’s spiral of addiction, albeit they are rarely seen or encountered in public view.

Among the men I spoke with, one had been a former major in the Afghan army who told me his addiction began only after a period of captivity at the hands of the country’s Islamist insurgent Taliban.

With this obvious exception, the stories given by the others had a familiar resonance and told of grinding poverty and homelessness like so many of their counterparts here in Scotland.

The sobering news this week that Scotland has the highest drug death rate in the European Union, while perhaps coming as little surprise, should serve as a wake-up call.

Already a plethora of experts, politicians and pundits have waded into the ongoing debate with their analysis and views, some less than edifying in their conclusions, it must be said. This, after all, is not an issue that should be the subject of party politicking or petty prejudices, but needs concerted and universal addressing if Scotland is to alleviate the suffering and toll drug addiction takes.

I’m far from knowledgeable about what is clearly a complex problem and will leave it to those best-placed and trained to take up such a daunting challenge. In the remit of this regular column, however, billed as a “window on the world,” I would like to widen the issue momentarily for readers to consider the global interconnectedness of heroin in particular.

While some of the deaths detailed in the latest figures for Scotland were from the use of pills such as diazepam and etizolam, the vast majority involved heroin.

It’s going on 10 years ago now that I first set out as a reporter to follow the heroin trail from Afghanistan to Scotland in a series of reports for newspapers and broadcast media.

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Alhough more than 3000 miles separate Kabul’s Karte Seh district and Glasgow’s Gorbals, the interconnectedness of addicts’ lives and the transnational scourge that is heroin was distilled in interviews I did with two young men whose names were Jawad and Stephen.

When I met him, Jawad was no stranger to pain. In Kabul’s drug “institutions”, the methods used to detox heroin addicts come from the Middle Ages. Head shaved and stripped naked, on numerous occasions he had been locked in a cell and hosed down with freezing water.

BUT it was the night when some policemen started beating him that the agony became so great he found himself begging them to stop. When eventually they did, he was so close to death his torturers decided it was safer to dispose of him in a hole near a heroin users’ den on the outskirts of the city.

“I lay there alone and couldn’t move; my legs were paralysed from the beating,” he recalled.

By chance some other drug users discovered Jawad, otherwise he would most likely have frozen to death in Kabul’s bitterly cold winter weather.

Stephen, a recovering heroin user from Glasgow, was also found in the nick of time. Newly released from the city’s Barlinnie prison, he had scored some heroin near one of the city’s hostels for homeless people before overdosing on a Gorbals street.

“When I came to, an ambulance had arrived, and a policeman told me I was lucky to be alive,” I recall Stephen telling me.

Then only 24, Stephen first tried heroin when he was 16 and by his 18th birthday was a regular user. His cousin Michael died of an overdose around the same age. The boy’s father came home from work one day to find his son dead with a needle still in his leg.

Heroin, be it in Afghanistan or right here in Scotland, is all about winners and losers. If Jawad and Stephen were the losers, then it was, and still is, the Taliban, Afghan warlords and organised crime who are the winners.

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I well recall how, back in 2001, Tony Blair was at pains to point out: “Ninety per cent of the heroin on British streets originates in Afghanistan.”

He said: “The arms the Taliban are buying today are paid for with the lives of young British people buying their drugs on British streets ... that is another part of their regime that we should seek to destroy.”

Afghanistan’s heroin trade, you see, was yet another reason why there was a “need” to go to war in the country. Yet, as I write, almost two decades later and with British troops by and large gone from the country, Afghanistan’s heroin trade flourishes. Right now it remains by far the biggest source of the opiate-based drugs that make their way on to Scotland’s streets and elsewhere in the UK.

For their part, the Taliban, along with some corrupt officials and the chain of organised criminal gangs who help traffick it to our shores and streets, profit handsomely. With an estimated annual export value of $1.5-$3 billion, the opium poppy is big business and, after a drought last year, analysts say that this year could be another bumper crop.

The Taliban’s annual share alone of this illicit drug economy is said to between $100-$400 million, with an additional “cultivation” and “laboratory tax” collected along the way from poppy famers. All of this buys the insurgents a lot of guns, bullets, bomb parts and rockets.

In that respect, at least, Blair was correct.

In response, the US has spent a staggering $1.5m a day since 2001 fighting the opium war in Afghanistan with little effect. Lately the Americans have taken to mounting air strikes, bombing heroin laboratories, which are often no more than makeshift workshops in rural areas, easily and quickly rebuilt.

While these US eradication and interdiction polices have not resulted in fewer quantities of drugs, the bombing has, however, killed innocent civilians, serving only to drive some into the ranks of the Taliban.

In short, as counter-narcotic strategies go it’s been a mess in Afghanistan compounded by the fact the West also continues to do business with government officials and warlords known to be involved in the massive illicit heroin trade.

Just as it’s time for a serious rethink here in Scotland over drugs policy, so too is the same required at the heroin supply’s source.

While prioritising the problem of reducing drug deaths here at home goes without saying, it would be foolish not to recognise the bigger picture. From Kabul to Clydeside and beyond, heroin knows no borders and takes no prisoners among those caught in its grip.