Word: hashed
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...Chaars is charas?hashish, pressed cannabis resin. Production is booming here in Afghanistan, aggravating a famine brought on by years of drought and war. A healthy field of hemp needs plenty of water. Dope growers in the mountains siphon off the streams that still flow, while hash farmers in the plains dig wells up to 100 meters deep to reach the water table. The combined effect of drought, reduced water from the hills and the cannabis cultivators' new boreholes is catastrophic, says Bertrand Brequeville of French aid group Action Contre la Faim. "It's only the rich drug producers...
...parties from New York City to New South Wales. For the decade before the Soviet army invaded in 1979, the teahouses of Afghanistan were the toking tourist's hangout of choice. And even during 23 years of war, when the Afghans fought the Soviets and then one another, the hash trade thrived. "Afghan black" remained a staple sale for cannabis dealers across the world. Mazar-i-Sharif gave its name to a particularly potent variety. And last year, in the final weeks of the Taliban, Amsterdam's coffee-shop owners even boasted they were doing their...
...Afghanistan emerges from war, dope farming has never been so good?and the drought never so bad. The Taliban banned hash production, but in the postwar chaos of lawless fiefdoms that dot the land, growers and traders across the country are finding themselves free once again to cultivate and export hashish without fear, and often with warlord protection. Moreover, the international perception that cannabis is a relatively benign drug?prompting some authorities across Europe and Australia to decriminalize its use?has persuaded drug-policing agencies to largely ignore it. So, while opium cultivation is monitored to the acre, neither Interpol...
...Once grown and pressed, Afghan hash is sold to freelance truck and jeep drivers who take it to Tajikistan or Kabul, where it is resold at four times the price. It's then smuggled via Central Asia or Pakistan to the West, where Afghan hash finds many eager buyers. But as dope smokers celebrate the new "enlightened" view of pot, any thought of the distant, parched land where it is grown has been lost in the haze. Back in the dust-bowl fields around Mazar, the growing foreign demand and new freedom to exploit it translate into a rare chance...
...Tensions over water have even led to murder. Last month, in a village called Shakhshirale close to the Turkmenian border, hash farmers shot dead a man who walked all day to demand two buckets of water. And in Saifudden's village of Dalicharbolak, the men there admit that after 12 people died of malnutrition over the summer, some among them gunned down two cannabis growers who were hoarding water upstream. An hour's drive to the east of Dalicharbolak, a village headman says his is the only settlement out of 38 nearby that has potable water?in effect, a single...