The opium trade is transforming life in Argo, a remote district in Badakshan where a cover of green poppies climbs up steep, desolate hills. The street that runs through the bazaar is mud, but the US$200 television sets in the stalls glitter.
In the last four years, said Abdul Rahman, 18, poppies provided his family with a motorbike, a television, an electric generator, a VCR and a CD player -- and a new house to hold it all. Last year his family accumulated US$4,000 in poppy profits.
Badakshan, here in the north, lays bare narcotics' distorting economic effects. Poppy cultivation has driven up dowry prices, and raised the cost of labor so much so that wheat was not harvested last year.
So many people are building new homes and businesses with their poppy profits that Atiqullah, 23, a mason, said his daily rate had doubled.
Joining the outlaws
Criminal calculation is partly driving the spread of the drug trade. Residents of Pashtun-inhabited regions long known for poppy growing have turned into outlaw Johnny Appleseeds, crossing the country with loans, expertise and seedpods to generate more opium for heroin laboratories, US and UN officials and Afghan farmers say.
But a calculus of human longing is also at work. With the price of opium stubbornly stuck at more than US$135 a pound, no legal crop can compete.
"We see in Daryan" -- a district thick with poppies -- "other people getting rich," said Rahmatullah, who like many Afghans uses one name. "Their life is better. We want to make our life better, too."
Today, growing poppies is less about survival -- as it was during a drought in this country -- than about upward mobility. It is about a new consumer class and an even larger class of aspirants to it.
"Those who had a donkey have a motorbike," said Ahmed Shah, a young farmer in Badakshan. "Those who had a motorbike have a car. Those who have one wife want a second one."
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