Sunday, April 01, 2012

The Smoke From Under the Burkha

From a Reuters story:
Anita lifted the sky-blue burqa from her face, revealing glazed eyes and cracked lips from years of smoking opium, and touched her saggy belly, still round from giving birth to her seventh child a month ago.  "I can't give breast milk to my baby," said the 32-year-old Anita, who like other women interviewed for this story, declined to give her full name. "I'm scared he'll get addicted
She was huddled with other women at the U.N.-funded Nejat drug rehabilitation center in the old quarter of Kabul, having sneaked out of her home to avoid being stopped by her husband from going outside alone.

...Like many of Afghanistan's female drug users, Anita picked up the habit from her husband.
Like other women interviewed for this story, Anita asked that only her first name be used...Opiate consumption in Afghanistan, where it has long been a medication but in recent years has been used increasingly for recreation, is also on a sharp rise. The UNODC says Afghanistan has around one million heroin and opium addicts out of a population of 30 million, making it the world's top user per capita...Najia said she picked up the habit from her husband after he returned from his job as a laborer in neighboring Iran [which...] has the second highest heroin abuse rate in the world after Afghanistan, according to UNODC. Afghan addicts among the 1 million refugees in Iran have become such an issue Tehran has started to expel them.

...inmate Madina looks nothing like an ordinary Afghan woman.
One of seven injecting heroin users in Badam Bagh, she lives with her teenage son and daughter in prison, where she has been for seven years since she killed her husband..."I would love to give it all up, but how am I meant to, as a woman?" the 37-year-old mother of two said as she scratched at the scabs on her arm, dark red from recent use. She supports her habit by selling handmade sexual aid tools -- stuffing compacted wool into condoms -- to other inmates, several of whom have developed lesbian relationships.
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1 comment:

Juniper in the Desert said...

Having read how Afghan women live and are treated, Reuters is being knowingly coy by calling opiate smoking "recreational"!! It is a way to dull all pain, physical and mental. Poor woman!! :((