A Fateful Harvest – Part 7 – Addiction


 

A Fateful Harvest – part 7 – Addiction – Over 100000 people use opium in Afghanistan. How many are addicted to heroin? Should opium be used as medicine to calm children? Today, illegal processing in Afghanistan has made drugs cheaper and more available within the country… The result is that increasingly Afghans themselves are succumbing to the dangers of the country’s largest cash crop. A recent United Nations survey puts the number of heroin addicts throughout the country at 50000. That’s in addition to 150000 people who use opium. Poverty and unemployment are two causes of drug abuse. But in Afghanistan, there’s another reason: Antonio Maria Costa: ‘…during the past quarter century, so many conflicts — against the Soviets, against one another, the mujahadin, the Civil War period, the Taliban rules, the fight against the Taliban, all of this has created a context whereby people, especially internally displaced people, especially refugees, finding themselves in dire conditions, so some of them started to use opium as a way of just forgetting the daily chores, and the daily difficulties and the tragedies in life President Karzai: ‘…drug addiction unfortunately has come to Afghanistan, mainly as consequence of being refugees in our neighboring countries. It ruins families, its something that worries me a lot its something that we have not yet has done much unfortunately.’ Many of the country’s addicts picked up their habit elsewhere — in neighboring Pakistan … or Iran, where per capita heroin use is the

 

Healthy Memphis: Answers to personal questions help guide medical care

Filed under: causes of drug addiction

But there are also significant "unnatural" causes of health changes: smoking, sleeplessness, fear or violence at home, alcohol and drug use, poor access to care, lack of help at home, depression and overwhelming stress and worry. A random visit for a …
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Bloomberg's Flock of Genetically Modified Mosquitoes Are Probably Coming to

Filed under: causes of drug addiction

And while we can't knock our mayor for being such a staunch supporter of education, we couldn't help but raise an eyebrow at one of his pet causes — genetically modified mosquitoes. Dr. Peter Agre, the Nobel Prize winning professor who runs … Or …
Read more on Village Voice (blog)