By the time the shooting ended, the A73 south of Nijmegan was littered with bullet casings, and one man lay dead in his car with another sprawled wounded in the passenger seat. The survivor refused to talk to police, even though a hired assassin had pursued his vehicle shooting at it without hitting for several miles before finally catching up and riddling it with automatic fire. Commuters were horrified, but the murder in September was wearily familiar to detectives who have dealt with 25 gangland-style killings in suburban southern Holland over the past three years. [continues 1085 words]
Where opium poppies used to colour the plains of northern Afghanistan, towering cannabis plants now sway in the wind, filling the air with their pungent odour. Farmers in Balkh province were banned from cultivating opium last year and have switched to another cash crop, a rich source of income that is still tolerated by the authorities. Balkh's burgeoning hashish industry does not pay farmers quite as much as the heroin factories used to for good-quality opium. But the rich black cannabis resin produced around the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif still pays about four times the price of cotton or wheat. It is highly prized by Afghan users and is exported in large quantities to Pakistan and Europe. [continues 379 words]
From Nick Meo in Hua Phan Province, Laos SINCE doctors confiscated Kua Ya's pipe in February the septuagenarian grandmother has been forced to stop using opium. She used to smoke six pipes a night, to help her to sleep and ease her aches. At the same time officials pulled up poppy plants growing on the hillsides of her village in northern Laos, part of a Communist Party programme to eradicate the drug by next year. They have been largely successful. The UN says that Laos, from being the world's third biggest source of opium, has reduced poppy production by 73 per cent in the past five years. This has won the Government plaudits, notably from the US. [continues 421 words]
Hamid Karzai has been officially named winner of the Afghan election, becoming the country's first leader to be elected by the people and putting him in a strong position for a confrontation with the country's warlords and a promised offensive against the booming drugs trade. The result has been obvious for a couple of weeks and was widely predicted long before polling day on 9 October. It could not be confirmed until yesterday, however, when a fraud inquiry team reported that the minor electoral corruption and technical errors it found were not serious enough to sour the victory. [continues 559 words]
Halima first smoked opium to dull the nightmares after her husband's violent death. He was shot at a checkpoint in front of her as they tried to flee fighting in Kabul, leaving her a widow at the age of 27 with three young children and a joyless future to look forward to. "I don't know who fired the shot," she said. "But I couldn't stop playing back my memories of him bleeding to death in the street and nobody to help." In the twilight half-life of an Afghan widow there was little distraction until a neighbour introduced her to a brown paste. [continues 684 words]
We Promised To Wipe Out The Afghan Poppy Fields. Instead More Heroin Than Ever Is About To Hit Britain BRITAIN has abandoned plans to wipe out Afghanistan's poppy fields despite fears this year's opium harvest will be the biggest ever. Now customs and police are bracing themselves for the arrival in the next few months of a glut of cheap heroin from the war-ravaged country, source of 90 per cent of the Class A drug on our streets. [continues 588 words]
