It’s not only in Europe, Iran, China, the Central Asian Republics and Russia that the enormous surge in Afghan heroin production has become a dangerous and even critical menace to their citizens. In Afghanistan  there has been creation and massive growth of drug addiction.

The annual production of heroin from Afghan opium is around 300,000 kg. Afghanistan, where, as reported in the UN Office on Drugs and Crime 2016 Opium Survey, the area under poppy cultivation increased from 183,000 to 201,000 hectares in 2015-2016, and opium production has risen by 43 %. Heroin addiction was not in any way a social problem in either Afghanistan or Pakistan at that time, or for many years. But it is, now.

 In November 2001 President GW Bush, the man who initiated the axis of chaos and despair from Afghanistan to the Middle East, told the United Nations that “I make this promise to all the victims of that regime: the Taliban's days of harbouring terrorists and dealing in heroin and brutalizing women are drawing to a close”. The pledges of the foolish Bush came to nothing. There are more terrorists in Afghanistan than there were before he ordered the invasion, and the heroin problem is disastrous. As to brutalized women, the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction noted in October that «fifteen years after the United States ousted the Taliban regime, Afghanistan remains one of the worst places in the world to be a woman».

In July 2000, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, collaborating with the

United Nations to eradicate heroin production in Afghanistan, declared that growing poppies was un-Islamic, resulting in one of the world's most successful anti-drug campaigns. The Taliban enforced a ban on poppy farming via threats, forced eradication, and public punishment of transgressors. The result was a 99% reduction in the area of opium poppy farming in Taliban-controlled areas, roughly three quarters of the world's supply of heroin at the time.^[16] The ban was effective only briefly due to the deposition of the Taliban in 2002. The US invasion has in fact been instrumental in a massive increase in opium production, with public eradication efforts being largely window dressing. Notably, there was a large increase in the area under cultivation between 2002 and 2014. Afghanistan is also the largest producer of cannabis (mostly as hashish) in the world.

Brian Cloughley is spot on where he says: the United States invaded Afghanistan fifteen years ago and the armies of its NATO allies joined in 2003. In all their time in the country they have been unable to control the production of drugs, to discourage corruption, or get rights for women or to quell violence. Indeed, drug production, corruption and savage barbarity have surged to their highest ever peaks.

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