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When opium is the only pain relief available to the poor of Badakhshan
Shahab Ariaiy* authored this report for the Zan Times in Persian, and it was translated into English by Rustam Seerat.
Women in Qamargul’s remote village warned her against using opium for her pregnancy-related back pain. But with no health centre near her difficult-to-access home, the 22-year-old felt she had no choice but to use opium to dull her pain.
The mud house in which Qamargul* lives with her husband and their only child is so poorly built that they sleep in the kitchen for warmth during the winter. In addition, they can’t afford to buy enough wood to heat the rest of their home. Once Qamargul began taking opium, she found it hard to stop. She isn’t alone. Others in her district have discovered that opium can be a more effective pain reliever than prescription drugs but don’t realize the effects of addiction, which can be impossible to escape.
“Thirty-five to 40 percent of women in the border districts, especially in Shighnan, Wakhan, Khowahan, and Zibak are using opium in some way, and most of them have become addicted due to continuous use,” explains a public health department source in Badakhshan Province. Now, Qamargul says she finds it too difficult to do her household chores without…
