Drug Traffickers take extraordinary measures, Tajikistan suffers
Tajikistan made the front page of the Wall Street Journal today (January 18th issue - subscription required) in an article on the increased poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, and the corresponding increased drug traffic in Tajikistan.
Tajikistan stands as a stark example of how quickly and deeply this drug can wound a society. The northern heroin route through the country began spiking dramatically three years before the 2001 U.S. invasion next door, and after the end of a brutal Tajik civil war that claimed more than 60,000 lives. The war’s damage, in a country that had been the Soviet Union’s poorest republic, drove the Tajiks further into poverty and dislocation. And then the Afghan heroin started flowing over the border.
The number of Tajik drug addicts seeking treatment has increased eightfold in 10 years, according to government statistics, with half of that increase coming since 2001.
“This is worse than a nuclear bomb,” says Batir Zalimov, a 36-year-old former heroin user who now works with recovering addicts. As in Europe, “the addicts are getting younger and younger,” he says. These days, he says, there are users as young as 14 years old. When the first wave of heroin washed over from Afghanistan, Tajik youths had no idea how dangerous and addictive the drug was, especially when taken intravenously.
The rise in shooting heroin has spun of a Tajik AIDS problem in the past five years, and 5,000 people are now estimated to have HIV. Eighty percent of all new cases are passed through dirty needles. Tajikistan has just negotiated its first-ever order of antiretroviral drugs.
The article traces the route of the drug trade from Afghanistan to Tajikistan to Russia to Europe, and finally to the United States. The falling drug prices has led to a increase in drug addiction especially in Germany, where there are substantial Central Asian immigrant communities.
The article has some interesting specifics on how drugs are being illicitly transported over the border. No wonder the Tajiks are having a tough time intercepting them:
The suspicious whirring of a motor came from somewhere in the dark skies above the river separating Northern Afghanistan from Tajikistan. Tajik border guards say they shouted warnings and then opened fire. What fell out of the sky was a motorized parachute carrying 18 kilograms of heroin.
The next day the machine was all laid out in the courtyard of the border guards’ barracks: a red, blue and white French-made parachute outfitted with a harness ring, a German-made motor, a small propeller, a plastic gas canister – and 18 one-kilo bags of Afghan heroin…. The soldiers’ bullets had pierced the gas tank, forcing an emergency landing, but the guards never found the pilot.
A few days later, border guards at the same post intercepted a water-borne heroin vehicle – an inner tube from a heavy truck with wooden boards laid on top for the smuggler to sit on.
Drug traffickers take extraordinarily sophisticated measures to ensure that their lucrative products reach their destination. Tajikistan is the first staging ground for the finished product, and as a result are bearing the brunt of its ill effects. There is no easy solution for this problem, but it has to start with Afghanistan, the United States, and international organizations. With transportation methods getting more advanced every day, Tajik border guards are already bearing an unfair cost for a problem that is essentially coming from another country.
on January 19th, 2006 at 6:01 pm
it is worth noting that Tajikistan shares the same cultural and historical heritage with Iran, which need to be cultivated and kept notwithstanding the differences in political aspirations of the two nations. Russia, while a good neighbor would be a good strategic ally but there isn’t much in common between the two countries except for the Soviet past, which pretty much every country in the former Soviet Union tries to forget.
on November 22nd, 2006 at 6:56 am
Thus the disappearance of a group due to action by the forces of order would seem to have but a limited effect on the overall level of fraud. Consequently action by the State might also be seen as the tool of Darwinian-type natural selection that allows the better organised networks to develop.
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