Word: heroinism
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...several days he hunkered down in that hotel room and was bombarded with questions by U.S. government agents. What was going on in the war in Afghanistan? Where was Mullah Omar? Where was bin Laden? What was the state of opium and heroin production in the tribal lands Noorzai commanded--the very region of Afghanistan where support for the Taliban remains strongest? Noorzai believed he had answered everything to the agents' satisfaction, that he had convinced them that he could help counter the Taliban's resurgent influence in his home province and that he could be an asset...
...this context that U.S. officials argue over who's a friend, who's an enemy and how you can tell them apart. Drug enforcement officials claim Noorzai's capture as a major prize. Afghanistan is the world's largest source of heroin, and his arrest, says DEA administrator Karen Tandy, "sent shock waves through other Taliban-connected traffickers." But Noorzai was also a powerful leader of a million-member tribe who had offered to help bring stability to a region that is spinning out of control. Because he is in a jail cell, he is not feeding...
...Even then, the wages paid by the security forces are minuscule compared to what a fighter can earn working for a heroin-trafficking warlord. Still, says Jawad, government recruiters are able to play on patriotism and moral duty. "We should not look at strictly on a dollar basis," he says. "This is building Afghanistan, and the other path is destroying Afghanistan. So people are willing to take some sacrifices providing they're able to feed their children...
...electrical power distribution system - only 6% of Afghans now have dependable electrical power, according to Jawad - and to constructing roads. Farmers unable to move crops to market in the cities are turning to opium growing because the harvest, reduced to opium paste, then processed to morphine base or finished heroin, is relatively imperishable and highly concentrated - and the trafficking groups handle all the transportation headaches. But Afghan and U.S. officials acknowledge that Afghanistan's viability as a state depends on whether the security and infrastructure can be put in place to nurture a legitimate economy in the hinterlands...
...missing women case has been the catalyst for a sea change in public attitudes to illegal drugs in British Columbia. Vancouver now leads North America in treating addiction as a health and social problem as well as a crime. It hosts the continent's only supervised heroin injection site, as well as a clinic dispensing free heroin in a scientific trial. But not much has changed at street level in the Downtown Eastside. Some 15,000 injection-drug addicts, many of them mentally ill, are concentrated in Canada's most impoverished neighborhood. An estimated 1500 female addicts continue to sell...