Heroin comes home to roost in Pakistan

Press, 21 November 1986, Page 17

Heroin comes home to roost in Pakistan

From

AHMED RASHID

in Karachi

Pakistan was, until recently, one of the world’s largest exporters of heroin. Now the country is one of the largest consumers of the drug. A recent survey estimates that one out of every' 19 Pakistanis is an addict or regular user of one or other drug. Omar, aged 13, calls it the powder of dreams. He has been a heroin addict for three years and his mother, father and two brothers are also hooked. A friend brought Omar to the detoxification ward of Lyari General Hospital in Karachi. He sits on a metal frame bed, with sunken cheeks, vacant, staring eyes looking like an old man. The ward, with just 12 beds has a three-month waiting list. It is only one of a handful of such wards, catering to an addict population of over 50,000 people in Karachi alone. Just outside the hospital gates children, aged from six to eight, run up to passers-by offering small plastic packets of heroin for 10 rupees. It is enough to roll one heroin cigarette — the favoured method to take the “love poison.” A cured addict walking out of the hospital can be hooked again in a moment. There are no

policemen in sight. “The dealers pay them off every week,” says an addict. Lyari is one of the worst of Karachi’s slums. There are constant electricity breakdowns, acute water shortages, a flood of handguns, drugs and crime. Drinking water is frequently contaminated with sewage. But drug addiction in Pakistan is not just confined to the slums. In Karachi’s elite Defence Society where champagne parties are the norm, cocaine is the ‘rage. Karachi University authorities estimate that 50 per cent of their student body has, at some time or other, experimented with drugs. There are now estimated to be 250,000 addicts in the country, which, just six years ago, professed no drug addiction problem. The local news media blame the influx of some three million Afghan refugees, who brought with them their drug growing culture. Last winter a government attempt to destroy poppy fields in the Frontier Province

bordering Afghanistan almost led to a tribal uprising. The troops were withdrawn and the tribesmen given compensation. Just outside Karachi there is an Afghan smugglers’ bazaar called Shorab Goth where Afghans, stilt on United Nations relief aid,’ drive air-conditioned Japanese cars and have built palaces in the desert. Police officials, however, maintain that because drugs exports have suffered due to greater police vigilance, the big dealers are now trying to hook the local population. In June customs officers seized tons of hashish from a Karachi beach and arrested seven Pakistanis, a Frenchman and an Afghan. Some of the biggest dealers are, in fact, Pakistanis. Although dozens of well-to-do Pakistanis have been caught in the West for smuggling drugs, the local police have never netted a big fish. “Last year the police found 50 tons of hashish and half a ton of heroin, but not a single leading smuggler,” says a Karachi journalist who keeps track of the

drugs trade. Most observers agree that there is massive protection from top government officials for big smugglers. Last week opposition members of the National Assembly in Islamabad demanded why a former governor of the Frontier Province and retired general, Fazle Haq, was not being invest!) sated for dealing in drugs. Governor Nawab Hoti, who replaced him, had to resign after just two months, because his son was caught selling drugs in the United States. In Karachi and Islamabad the big dealers are pointed out to journalists. They live an openly sumptuous lifestyle and often entertain officiate and politicians. "Nine years of martial law left to a total lack of accountability. That is why powerful people can get away with so much and why the poor have to suffer the ravages of drugs,” the Party Leader, Benazir Bhutto, says. . * Although martial law ended sixmonths ago, there is still no sign of a crackdown on the drugs trade by the new civilian government. —(Copyright London Observer Service).