Police raid on a greenhouse where marijuana and opium poppies were grown in La Cumbre, in the Honduran municipality of La Iguala. Credit: Courtesy of Policía Nacional.

By Thelma Mejía
LA IGUALA, Honduras, Mar 15 2014 (IPS)

Discovery and destruction of an elaborate greenhouse for growing opium poppy and marijuana on a western hill, La Cumbre, has alerted the Honduran authorities to the fact that this is no longer just a transit country for illicit drugs, but also a producer and processor.

This is the first time that opium poppies have been found in this country. Previously, the only place in Central America where they had been recorded was in the Guatemalan region of El Petén. Opium paste is the raw material for making heroin, which is highly addictive and is re-emerging as a drug of choice.

On Jan. 31, the authorities announced the discovery of the high-tech greenhouse on the steep mountain, 1,600 metres above sea level and 400 kilometres from Tegucigalpa, in the hamlet of La Cumbre in the municipality of La Iguala. IPS visited the place, which is reached by tracks that are barely passable by rural vehicle and on horseback.

On the way up the trail went through five hamlets, and wound between wild flowers and coffee plantations, typical for the department (province) of Lempira. The roads were creviced and narrow, wet and muddy; they become impassable in the rainy season that begins in May.

At the end of the trail, the remains of the greenhouse came into view. It was 100 metres long and 40 metres wide, and 1,800 opium poppy plants and 800 of the Dutch variety of marijuana (cannabis) were found there.

The enclosed area was air-conditioned, with a large generator, a modern irrigation system and high-efficiency equipment.

Carlos Mejía, deputy superintendent of the National Police in Lempira, who headed the seizure raid, told IPS “we suspect there are many more plantations in these enormous western mountains, so we are combing the entire region.”

Two people were captured during the operation, Rubén Darío Pinilla, a Colombian, and Orlando Jacinto Miranda, a Honduran. Miranda worked for Pinilla, and grew vegetables on his farm as a “front” for his illegal activities at the greenhouse, Mejía said.

Another police officer present during the raid told IPS that the registered owner of the land, a local person, is being investigated, and that he himself might be fronting for someone else. It is assumed that crops of opium and marijuana have already been harvested here.

A teacher in the community of El Matazano, at the foot of the large hill, told IPS in confidence that “it was high time they caught those people.”

“For some time now, we have seen four-wheel-drive vehicles on these bridle paths at night, loaded with plastic barrels, and people have been saying that marijuana was being grown on that hill, but this opium poppy business is news to us,” the teacher said.

The mayor of La Iguala, Marcio Orlando Miranda, told IPS that Pinilla had been arrested in July 2013 for illegal logging in the forest close to the greenhouse, but strangely, he was freed. “There was collusion with the authorities,” he insisted.

Pinilla is in prison awaiting trial for drug trafficking, while those responsible for freeing him last year are under investigation, and a prosecutor has already been suspended.

Mayor Miranda said that for some time,“strangers have been appearing around here, and it is said that many local farms are being used to grow marijuana and this opium poppy that I never heard of before.”

La Iguala is a municipality of 27,000 people, where maize, beans and particularly coffee are grown. There is only one police post, with five poorly-equipped officers, to serve its 26 villages and 86 hamlets.

The operation that dismantled the greenhouse was organised from Tegucigalpa by the National Police anti-drug squad and was headed by the Lempira branch, which is also very short of manpower, equipment and vehicles in the fight against powerful drug traffickers.

The authorities suspect that in adjacent provinces like Ocotepeque and Copán, which border on Guatemala and El Salvador, there may be more opium poppy plantations. Lempira also shares its southern border with El Salvador.

In February the police found what appeared to be a clandestine laboratory in the Nueva Arcadia region of Copán, that was suspected of being used for cocaine processing, together with underground tunnels, heavy machinery and a helipad.

Nueva Arcadia and La Iguala are both economically depressed zones located among tree-covered mountains.

But they are not the only indications that the drug trade is changing its spots in Honduras, which has been a transit zone since the 1970s and is now a country where drugs are grown, processed and even, to a lesser extent, sold.

Eugenio Sosa, a sociologist and university professor, told IPS that Honduras “has for a long time ceased to be a transit country. There are indications that drug trade penetration is much deeper than that, and growing opium poppies only reflects one of the forms of organised crime.

“The authorities seek to present these discoveries as a success, but one has to ask: are more drugs seized because more are being trafficked, because they are being produced and processed, or because the authorities are more efficient?” he said.

“I have my doubts about the last of these possible answers,” he said.

Mirna Flores, an expert on security issues, attributes the expansion of drug-related crimes to displacement of the trafficking routes due to the war against drugs in Mexico, which has prompted the cartels to dispute territories in Central America.

“Honduras’s geographical location appeals to the cartels and they have become more sophisticated in their expansion strategies, based on corruption and impunity,” she told IPS.

In her view, “that is why these plantations and processing laboratories have arisen.”

The Atlantic cartel, on the northern Caribbean coast, and the Valle cartel in the west are the main drug organisations operating in this country of 8.5 million people.

Analysts say the opium discovery will compel the government to crack down more effectively on the smaller cartels operating in the country, and on their political and economic bosses.

Official reports say that 80 percent of illegal drugs en route towards the lucrative United States market through Central America pass through Honduras, and connect this with the country’s having one of the world’s highest levels of violence, with an average of 19 violent deaths a day.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), in 2012 Honduras had the highest homicide rate in Latin America, at 81.9 per 100,000 population.

Most of those who meet violent deaths are young people, and although criminal investigation is fragile, the nature of most of these murders leads criminal experts to believe that they are the result of cartel turf wars and score settling.

Over 120,000 Afghan women and 60,000 children admit to being addicted to drugs. Credit: Anand Gopal/IPS

By Giuliana Sgrena
KABUL, May 24 2013 (IPS)

Located on a narrow street in a quiet neighbourhood in Kabul, the Sanga Amaj Women’s Treatment Centre is the only one of its kind in Afghanistan: named after the 22-year-old journalist who was assassinated in 2007, the facility caters exclusively to Kabul’s massive population of female drug addicts.

Out of respect for its residents’ privacy, the centre does not disclose its location and strictly monitors all visits. Here, a kind and professional staff dressed in white aprons attend to 25 women and an equal number of children between the ages of five and 11who spend most of their time in a cosy playroom filled with toys.

The entire facility is split between two floors, housing dormitory-style rooms with 12 beds each and an array of common rooms.

The clean, pleasant settings belie the desperate circumstances of the building’s occupants.

Most of the women here say they started out using opium and hashish, but turned to harder drugs like heroin in order to cope with “economic hardships, family violence, or psychological problems,” Storai Darinoor, one of the young coordinators at the facility, told IPS.

“In many cases husbands introduce their wives to drugs, often forcibly. When either one of the parents are addicts, the children generally become addicts, too,” she added. Women and children tend to favour oral intake of drugs, either eating or smoking their fix, but one 11-year-old in the centre was found to have been using injections.

Though the female residents declined to speak with IPS, staff members said that patients have admitted to taking heroin as “medicine” to ease the stresses of daily life.

“Young children are fed opium by their mothers to keep them quiet, while older children, in addition to consuming drugs themselves, provide drugs for their mothers,” according to Storai.

She says 80 percent of female addicts turned to drugs upon returning to the country from Iran and Pakistan, where they lived as refugees during the Taliban’s reign from 1996 to 2001.

The Sanga Amaj Centre receives funding through the drug advisory programme of the Colombo Plan – a U.S.-backed regional initiative designed to coordinate strategies for reducing demand and supply of narcotics in Asia – but only enough to provide the most basic therapy.

“Treatment typically lasts 45 days,” Dr. Huma Mansouri, director of the facility, tells IPS, beginning with a 10-day period of detoxification.

“After that we proceed to administering daily doses of buprenorphine (a semi-synthetic opioid) since we do not have access to methadone.” When this is inadequate to stop severe withdrawal symptoms – crying, screaming or beating their heads against a wall – staff members resort to “water therapy”: short, cold showers that help patients to relax.

After the first 10 days, medication is limited to daily doses of vitamins. The rest of the time in the facility is spent on rehabilitation, attending awareness sessions on the harmful effects of drug use and classes on different subjects including health, psychology and religion, “because drug use is forbidden in Islam,” Mansouri said.

The women then move into a three-month vocational programme, learning sewing and computer skills, which open up employment opportunities once they leave the centre.

One of the facility’s 12 staff members is then assigned to “follow” the women for a two-year period, making weekly house visits, offering support or advice, and providing counselling free of charge.

Not all of the women have a place to go after being discharged. Some are abandoned by their families as a result of their addiction and have no way of supporting themselves. Whenever possible, the centre hires its old patients to work as cleaners in the facility.

To date, the centre has treated over 1,100 women, of which “only 145 have relapsed,” according to Storai.

But the vast majority of women in Afghanistan have no access to such treatment, and often live out their days in a cycle of violence and poverty made worse by their addiction.

According to a survey conducted by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in 2010, the last time such data were gathered, roughly one million Afghans between the ages of 15 and 64 were addicted to drugs, or three percent of the population of 35 million.

An estimated 120,000 of these addicts are women, and over 60,000 are children.

Experts attribute these dismal figures to numerous factors, including a 40-percent unemployment rate and an increase in poppy cultivation: in 2012, an estimated 154,000 hectares of farmland were dedicated exclusively to poppy.

The UNODC 2013 Afghanistan Opium Risk Assessment says cultivation in the main poppy growing areas – like the southern regions of Helmand and Kandahar, and northern provinces like Herat, Faizabad and Badakhshan – is expected to rise even further in the coming years.

The country, which used to supply about half of Europe’s heroin in 2001, now accounts for a full 90 percent of the global supply of opiates, making it the world’s largest producer by far. An estimated 26 percent of the country’s GDP comes directly from the narcotics trade, which the U.N. report says is “strongly” linked to economic insecurity and a lack of agricultural aid.

Though Afghanistan has a long history of opium use, with many families in the north taking moderate doses in order to work longer hours, addiction levels did not reach such heights until the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 forced warring mujahideen groups out of the cities and into rural areas, where they took over vast poppy fields and established “production centres and laboratories along the northern border,” Dr. Tariq Suliman, director of ‘Nejat’, one of the few drug rehabilitation centres in Kabul, told IPS.

Located in the impoverished Karte Char neighbourhood in western Kabul, Nejat sits in the middle of a huge concentration of drug users, who congregate in parks, crouch under bridges or trees, or even just sit in the middle of the road to get their fix.

While heroin is the most widely used drug – available at virtually every street corner for six dollars a gramme – hashish and opium are also readily available. For a population with an average income of just 500 dollars a year, this is a steep price to pay, and often pushes families deeper into poverty.

The government’s ministry of counter narcotics has no funds with which to implement prevention, treatment or rehabilitation programmes, leaving the onus for this work entirely on the shoulders of civil society, laments Suliman.

Experts say women bear the brunt of addiction, partly because religious and cultural taboos preventing women from consuming drugs mean that few actively seek treatment for fear of being stigmatised.

Female drug addicts here are a kind of “hidden population”, secreting themselves away in their homes, which, in turn, breeds a culture of violence against children and pushes the latter closer towards addiction.

Experts say that unless the government allocates more money for the creation of facilities like the Sanga Amaj Centre, the thousands of female addicts have no hope of a better future.