Insight: Lifting the veil on Afghanistan's female addicts

How about “lifting the veil” on America’s female addicts. Seems more of a concern to me than Afghanistan’.s.

True, but you missed the point. So called religious freaks have many sins as we do. All the more it shows how primitive we are thanks to face book.

You can thank NATO for this. Their direction to the soldiers over there was not to burn the poppy fields as that was the only source of income for the peasants.

Three years when hearing I thought that is stupid, ignorant. I still think it is stupid and ignorant.

Get the USA out of NATO. What gives with putting the US citizen at the bottom of the totem pole.

Superstition, ignorance, and religious intolerance are the universal bane to intelligent life. Such a tragedy being stuck in the Dark Ages and unable to evolve.

Conflating the numbers of women who use heroin with those who use hashish is not helpful to any serious analysis of the problems of addiction and treatment in Afghanistan.

Some local addiction is simply a cost of doing business in a 4th world country (that’s a country in 3rd world poverty with the added deficit of a medieval mentality), where the only cash crop in wartime it opium, and where the infusion of first world cash has done little for the lives of the people but broadcast already endemic corruption.

Afghanistan is a perpetual mess. It is not augmenting America’s 21st century survival to continue to fund this pestilence. Remember — Americans can’t even fix Mississippi. To try our hands in Afghanistan is a combination of hubris and stupidity… maybe those two are only on thing…

Joey Tranchina
Sete, France

Hmmmm…..”There has been a definite increase amongst women drug users over the last decade,” said Arman Raoufi, director of harm reduction for women at Nejat.” HMMMMMM….”Increased street prostitution since the fall of the Taliban, which policed the trade more rigorously than the government does today, has also contributed, he said.” I don’t think it takes a genius to see that the U.S and its “allies” phony “war on terror” in Afghanistan has done NOTHING but quadruple the problems for the people, as well as introduced the American and European plague of diseased addiction. I feel that it is awfully coincidental that Afghanistan is mentioned as the source of the addicts in the story, as well as Iran being the agitator and “root source” of the problem. What many of you reading this may want to do is look into your own local statistics of addiction. You will see that American and European addicts have risen drastically since the late 90s also; ever since 9/11, the Patriot Act, and the War on Terror. The Taliban outlawed the cultivation of the opium poppy, while the “Western Crusaders”, after overthrowing the Taliban rule (that they funded to begin with in the 80s and 90s) at first ignored the law that prohibited poppy cultivation, and now supports its industry. Remember, nowadays your local addict didn’t just one day start “smokin’ rocks” or “spikin’ D” as the youth and young adults of the 80s and 90s. They got hooked when they or their parents broke their ankle, wrist, knee, or had an operation for a minor appendicitis or tonsellitis and were prescribed Oxycodone (Oxycontin, Percocet) or Hydrocodone (Vicodin, Lortab). It wasn’t until 2000/2002 when people who were being prescribed these deadly painkillers started to go to Heroin for a cheaper high of the same caliber. Think about it. It’s too coincidental to have happened naturally.