Afghanistan is the world’s fastest-growing maker of methamphetamine, a report from the UN drug agency said yesterday.
The country is also a major opium producer and heroin source, even though the Taliban declared a war on narcotics after they returned to power in August 2021.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC), which published the report, said that meth in Afghanistan is mostly made from legally available substances or extracted from the ephedra plant, which grows in the wild.
Photo: AP
The report called the country’s meth manufacturing a growing threat to national and regional health and security because it could disrupt the synthetic drug market and fuel addiction.
It said that seizures of meth suspected to have come from Afghanistan have been reported from the EU and east Africa.
Annual meth seizure totals from inside the country rose from less than 100kg in 2019 to nearly 2,700kg in 2021, suggesting increased production, the report said.
However, it could not give a value for the country’s meth supply, the quantities being produced, nor its domestic usage, because it does not have the data.
UNODC Research and Trend Analysis Branch Director Angela Me said that making meth, especially in Afghanistan, had several advantages over heroin or cocaine production.
“You don’t need to wait for something to grow,” said Me. “You don’t need land. You just need the cooks and the know-how. Meth labs are mobile, they’re hidden. Afghanistan also has the ephedra plant, which is not found in the biggest meth-producing countries: Myanmar and Mexico. It’s legal in Afghanistan and it grows everywhere, but you need a lot of it.”
Me said it was too early to assess what effect the Taliban’s drug crackdown has had on meth supplies.
Afghan Ministry of Interior Affairs spokesman Abdul Mateen Qani said that the Taliban-run government has prohibited the cultivation, production, sale and use of all intoxicants and narcotics in the country.
He said that authorities have destroyed 644 factories and about 4,856 hectares of land where prohibited narcotics were cultivated, processed or produced, adding that the government has conducted more than 5,000 raids in which 6,000 people were arrested.
“We cannot claim 100 percent that it is finished because people can still do these activities in secret. It is not possible to bring it to zero in such a short time,” Qani said. “But we have a four-year strategic plan that narcotics in general and meth in particular will be finished.”
An Afghan health official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said that about 20,000 people are in hospitals for drug addiction, mostly to crystal meth.
About 350 of them are women, they said, adding that children are also being treated, but they did not give the number nor their ages.
A UN report published in November last year said that opium cultivation since the Taliban takeover increased by 32 percent over the previous year, and that opium prices rose following authorities’ announcement of a cultivation ban in April last year.
Farmers’ income from opium sales tripled from US$425 million in 2021 to US$1.4 billion last year.
The report also said that the illicit drug market thrived as Afghanistan’s economy sharply contracted, making people open to illegal cultivation and trafficking for their survival.
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