A mother sitting beside her 25-year-old son, who is addicted to drugs, in Karachi. Akhtar Soomro/Reuters
The Drugs of War -- Huma Yusuf, New York Times
LONDON — Last week Canadian officials seized 22 kilograms of heroin worth $8.8 million on a flight that originated in Pakistan. Last month Indian Border Security Force officials found 105 kilograms of heroin concealed among bags of cement on a train from Pakistan, one of the largest-ever seizures of contraband in India.
Drug trafficking, like terrorism, is a devastating fallout for Pakistan of the conflict in Afghanistan.
In 1980, there were only 50,000 drug users in Pakistan; by 2011 there were 8.1 million, according to official statistics, and many health experts and social workers think the number is much higher. One reason for the spike is that Pakistan became a major transit route in the 1980s, when trafficking was officially sanctioned in Afghanistan as a way to fund the anti-Soviet mujahedeen.
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My comment: Afghanistan has the same problem .... a million plus opium addicts. A friend of mine served one year in Afghanistan with the Canadian military .... the stories and pictures that he has shown me on the impact of heroin addition are truly disturbing.
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