AFP: In 2016 Afghanistan, which produces 80 percent of the world’s opium, made around 4,800 tonnes of the drug bringing in revenues of three billion dollars, according to the United Nations. The Taliban — which banned poppy cultivation when it ruled Afghanistan — now appears to wield significant control over the war-torn country’s heroin production line,
Washington Post: One recent morning, three figures in white lab coats descended cautiously into a pitch-black netherworld beneath a crumbling bridge in the Afghan capital. They picked their way through garbage and sprawled limbs, passing hundreds of huddled men whose gaunt, wary faces were briefly illuminated by the flare of matches and drug pipes. The doctors
VOA News May 16, 2017 WASHINGTON — The world’s number one opium-producing country, Afghanistan, is braced for an exploding poppy harvest this year, as farmers are cultivating the illicit crop in areas where it has never grown before. “Unfortunately, the narcotics production is on the rise this year,” Javed Qaem, Afghan deputy counternarcotics minister, told international
VOA News April 4, 2017 KABUL, AFGHANISTAN — An Afghan official says that in the past 12 months the country’s counter-narcotics department has seized almost 650 tons of contraband drugs and alcohol. Gen. Baz Mohammad Ahmadi, deputy interior minister for the counter-narcotics police, says the confiscated drugs include raw opium, heroin and hashish. He says that