Sign of Afghan Addiction May Also Be Its Remedy

Dr. Shafi Azim, second from left in back row, a psychiatrist, with his police officer patients at the Hospital for Interior Ministry Addicts in the capital, Kabul.

By ROD NORDLAND and ABDUL WAHEED WAFA
NYT

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Hospital for Interior Ministry Addicts is both a symptom of how bad this country’s drug addiction problem is, and a possible solution for one of its worst aspects.

On the one hand, its patients are all policemen. On the other hand, those policemen are no longer on the street, trying to feed heroin and opium addictions that can easily cost triple their official salaries.

Gen. Dawood Dawood, the country’s drug enforcer as deputy interior minister for counternarcotics, was so proud of the three-month-old institution that he issued a personally signed letter authorizing reporters to visit Sunday. When hospital officials balked — saying they were worried the incarcerated policemen would be so angry they might throw rocks at visitors — the general’s staff intervened to make sure the visit took place.

Before the tour, General Dawood said at a news conference that a systematic program that had so far administered urine tests to 95 percent of the Afghan National Police found 1,231 of them addicted to hard drugs, mostly heroin and opium — a rate of about 1.5 percent of the force. Afghanistan also has a severe shortage of trained police officers, so instead of firing them, it has begun sending them to the Hospital for Interior Ministry Addicts for three- to four-week rehabilitation programs.

(More here.)