They are between 6 and 18 years old. They use heroin daily, helping to harvest opium in the fields, or are employed as mules to smuggle drugs to Iran. Highly endangering their lives.
She has the voice of a smoker in a terminal stage of Cancer. However, Jamila is barely old enough to sit on the school benches. She’s six and does not smoke tobacco but Crystal; a very pure heroin. With her sister, Farzana, 11, they “need” it three times a day. Otherwise, they feel pain in their legs and belly.
After thirty minutes of conversation, the faces of the children become grave, gazing at the blackened walls of the single room where the whole family lives. A big portable stove sits in the middle of the tochaks, some slim matresses rolled during the day to make space. Are they bored of the foreigner’s questions? The youngest girl is shivering. Something is whispered to the translator: Jamila and Farzana ask permission to smoke.
Their gesture is assured and quick. The heavy gas bottle is grabbed and lit with a match. The girls unpack a little stone of Crystal, a compact brown powder. This is then stuck on an iron wire. Another wire sweeps the flames and finally turns red. Both wires, once in contact, produce a white smoke which is immediately inhaled through a paper straw. The Crystal liquifies and sizzles. Puff after puff, nothing is lost. Once the drug is consumed, the faces release a smile of soothing comfort. A heavy veil cocoons the Crystal children.
After this unbearable spectacle comes the game. Almost odd. The girls search in a niche dug into a mud-wall and get out some blond-haired dolls in bad shape. Like everywhere in the world, these plastic beings have an imaginary life told by the children. Do dolls smoke? “No”, answers the youngest. “They do not have the right. It is not good.” None of the sisters go to school. Their parents are farmers who, after successive droughts, have lost everything. Today, they went to the city to beg.
The lack of access to medical care pushes mothers into using opium or heroin on their infants. When parents smoke, it is common to see them exhaling deliberately on their babies. The begining of addiction… When Farzana and Jamila could walk, it had been difficult to stop them from starting smoking as their anger and withdrawal increased with their growing addiction.
Thirty years of war, an absence of infrastructure and the nepotism of a corrupt state prevent farmers from considering the shift to farming other crops. Heroin is easy to buy in the provinces of Herat, Farah and Nimroz (1 dollar a gram) because they are situated on the traffic route between Afghanistan and Iran. For addicts, getting hold of Crystal comes before providing food.
Less than a decade ago, opium harvested here was sent to Iran and elsewhere to be turned into heroin. Today, with the return of the war, laboratories have been strategically placed inside Afghanistan. Meaning drug lords can turn opium into heroin close to the place of cultivation. Ten kilos of raw opium give one kilo of pure heroin. Ten times less substance to transport. The heroin routes are the same roads used by the black- market purveyors of weapons, oil, tobacco and medicines.
Smugglers caught by Iranian authorities risk the Death Penalty, by hanging, if they are not beaten to death while being captured. Since the year 2000, Iran has officially declared war on the drugs trade. The trade of opiates finances insurrectionary groups and so a trench has been dug in order to stop four-wheel-drives forcing the border. Parts of the border are protected by a 7 foot high wall. The 936 kilometer long border is studded with Iranian
army garrisons. Even though no country in the world has ever seized such quantities, Iran remains the first place of transit for heroin which continues to flood the streets of Europe. 90 tons are consumed every year in Europe alone.
And drug lords do not hesitate to employ children. Numerous young Afghans routinely swallow five gram capsules, to be smuggled into Iran. Expulsion of the capsules is terribly painful. If the plastic wrap, common shopping bag plastic, breaks, the child has no chance of surviving the inevitable overdose. Sometimes, the drugs can’t be expelled and the young mules end up in hospital for surgery to open their stomach. Children say they earn between 100 and 300 dollars per crossing; about what a family lives on for a month or two.
Drug traffickers tell the children that if they get caught, being a child will save them. This is not the case at all. Zalmaï is one of the rare witnesses who have survived the Iranian jails. The teenager experienced the brutality first-hand: “There were three of us and we were transporting 450 grams of Crystal”.
When he was arrested, Zalmaï was beaten and “tortured with electricity”. Finally, he was taken to a jail called Qezel Hesar in Karaj, near Tehran. “Many Afghans were confined there and many of them
were under 18.” He claims. “Every Tuesday and Thursday, they used to call upon some of the detainees. They were told that they had someone coming to visit them, or that they were invited to a soccer game. But everyone knew that Wednesdays and Fridays were the days for hanging.”
Iran has recently become second only to China in its use of the Death Penalty. This increase coincides with the beginning of the repression linked to drug trafficking. “One day they called me. But it was a mistake. They took me for someone else. Usually, they wait until the children reach 18 to execute them”. Presumably, this is in order to respect international laws on children rights.
Zalmaï spent two years in Qezel Hesar. The lucky adolescent was released, thanks to the sheer determination of his family. Fairly wealthy, they sold their fields in order to give the 20,000 dollars needed for his freedom. Abdelatif, one of his companions in misfortune did not have the same luck. He was hanged. His family still had to pay 500 dollars for “the price of the rope”. A bribe which gives the family the right to collect the body.
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