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

 

Celebrities & Addiction: Charles R Cross on Ryan Leaf

Filed under: causes of drug addiction

We have to come up with real solutions to drug and alcohol addiction." Cross thinks Leaf's addiction to pain pills represents a countrywide epidemic. "Prescription narcotic pain pills cause exactly the same euphoria as heroin or cocaine. As a society …
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Potential Cause of Depression Identified

Filed under: causes of drug addiction

A protein involved in synaptic structure has been identified as a potential cause of depression, a finding that according to researchers has "enormous therapeutic potential for the development of biomarkers and novel therapeutic agents." Investigators …
Read more on Medscape