Pakistan’s Domestic Narcotics Problem Reflects Regional Instability

by Richard H. Curtiss

Most Americans are aware that Pakistan, as part of the so-called “Golden Crescent” region of narcotics production in southwest Asia, has been a conduit for narcotics. These are primarily opium, which is refined into heroin, perhaps the most addictive of the hard drugs, and cannabis, the hemp plant whose derivatives are known as hashish in Europe and the Middle East, and marijuana in the United States. Americans also assume, rightly, that the narcotics traffic through Pakistan accelerated during the years of strife in neighboring Afghanistan, and that the situation will remain difficult to control until stability returns to that country, and the last of the more than two million Afghan refugees who streamed into Pakistan return home.

All of these assumptions are correct, but the problem as viewed from Pakistan itself takes on different dimensions, particularly in terms of increasing domestic drug use. It is such a serious problem that Pakistani legislators concluded they couldn’t wait to pass special laws to crack down hard on Pakistani drug traffickers, who have developed a large clientele among Pakistani drug users, as well as among foreign drug traffickers.

Saiyed Mohib Asad is a 53-year-old veteran of 27 years of police service whose last position was inspector general of police. Now he is deputy director of a special force set up within Pakistan’s Ministry of Narcotic Control. Until May his immediate superior was an army general who also was detailed to the narcotics force before rotating back to an army command. Both have worked closely with non-governmental organizations and international authorities, including the government of the United States, on three aspects of narcotics control: elimination of supplies in growing areas, interdiction of drug transport into and within Pakistan, and demand reduction through education.

The results, in view of the long history of opium poppy cultivation in Pakistan, are impressive in Asad’s view. During the long period of British colonial rule in the subcontinent before its partition in 1947 into India and Pakistan, opium was a legal product, organized by the British for production and export—largely to China.

For more than a decade after Pakistan became independent, legal cultivation continued, with licenses issued to farmers in the North West Frontier Province. The entire opium crop was purchased by the Pakistani government for medical and scientific purposes. Opium-based medicines were sold then as legal prescription and non-prescription drugs.

In 1979, however, as part of a broad series of ordinances promulgated under a military government to bring public practices more into conformity with Islamic traditions, the licensing system was abolished. In the 1978-79 crop season, the last season before promulgation of the hudud (prohibited practices) ordinances, Pakistani land under poppy cultivation was reported to be 80,500 acres.

By the 1993-94 crop season, this had been brought down to 1,383 acres. During the same period, opium production had been brought down from 800 tons in 1978-79 to some 109 tons in 1994-95. Among the methods used to accomplish this, with international help, were manipulation of taxes to encourage crop substitution.

Despite these highly encouraging domestic statistics, however, narcotics abuse within Pakistan soared. In 1980 there were an estimated 5,000 drug abusers in Pakistan, with heroin the principal drug in use. According to current estimates, there now are about 1,520,000 heroin addicts in Pakistan, out of a current population of 130 million. The estimated number of persons of all age groups abusing one or another narcotic drug is 3 million, and growing, with grave economic and health effects.

According to Asad, Pakistan’s heroin addicts outnumber the combined total of heroin addicts in the United States and Western Europe. It is about the same as the total in India, which has a much larger population.

The reason for this dramatic increase in Pakistani heroin addicts in the same time period in which opium production has been so drastically reduced in Pakistan lies outside the country. In 1979, the same year anti-narcotics laws were adopted in Pakistan, Russian forces invaded Afghanistan.

“Since then there has been no government in Afghanistan and our estimate of their production is some 3,000 tons annually,” Asad explains. “And Pakistan has the unsavory distinction of having the expertise to process it into heroin. A lot of it is being processed in our area in makeshift laboratories.”

He estimates that at 5 grams per addict per day, Pakistan’s internal heroin consumption may exceed its internal production, with imports from Afghanistan supplying both the remainder for domestic addicts and the surplus that still leaves Pakistani laboratories for foreign destinations.

Although Pakistani officials will not concede it, United Nations specialists with whom they work also charge that some of the heroin that enters Pakistan for processing and transshipping originates in Iran. Thus, Pakistani efforts to eliminate domestic supply have been conspicuously successful, but the problem still is out of control largely because of conditions outside Pakistan’s borders since 1979.

This places a burden on the second aspect of Pakistani narcotics control efforts: interdiction. Efforts in this field are based upon 1994 and 1995 amendments to Pakistan’s original hudud ordinances, based upon international treaties to which Pakistan has become a party.

As a professional policeman who studied both law and criminology in London, Asad deplores infringements of basic civil rights. However, he points out, Pakistan has adopted special measures to deal with its narcotics emergency. The Pakistani authorities have the power to impose preventative detention upon suspects for three months before charges are brought. Also, as in the United States, the authorities may examine private bank accounts, and they can impound goods used by drug traffickers or funds or property acquired with drug profits.

While sentences for drug use are relatively light, Pakistan has adopted stronger sentencing laws in connection with drug dealing. They are less severe, however, than draconian laws in effect in some other Middle Eastern and Asian countries like Iran, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia or Singapore, where drug smugglers are sentenced to death. Instead, Pakistan imposes a 25-year sentence for first-time drug trafficking convictions. The death sentence is imposed only on those who already have been convicted and served the long jail term for a first offense. As a result, to date no drug offender ever has been executed in Pakistan.

Asad says that during the 1980s, Pakistani anti-narcotic efforts were strongly supported by the West. However, as Pakistani exports of narcotics decreased, and the problem increasingly became one of growing internal narcotics consumption, international financial support weakened. This was reflected in reduced government budgets and lowered morale among those charged with narcotics control.

In 1990, however, the government of Pakistan created a specialized state force of 300 persons, mainly from the army. In 1995 separate narcotics agencies within the government were combined into a total force of 1,100, including administrators, support personnel, and enforcement agents. The number is projected to reach 2,600 by 1998.

U.S. support is largely for interdiction efforts in the form of vehicles and communications equipment. European Union and United Nations support is concentrated in the fields of demand reduction through detoxification and treatment. Asad says Pakistani efforts are weakest in the field of rehabilitation and training of former addicts, because success in this field can only be achieved through an integrated national effort.

“We have just formalized a master plan strengthening all of these three areas,” Asad says. Its goal is no production at all by 1998, stronger interdiction efforts, and better investigation, prosecution and conviction.

Though optimistic, Asad is realistic about the problems of controlling narcotics in Pakistan, which has the seventh largest population in the world. Some 90,000 cases per year are handled in police stations throughout the country. For the minor users, he believes the processing time of 10 to 12 days, followed in most cases by sentences of some three months, serves as little more than a detoxification period, which can help the addict only if he wants to be cured. The recovery rate among addicts caught and sentenced in this manner is only 8 percent.

Long-term efforts to reduce the enormous number of addicts, Asad believes, must depend also on educational, training, and psychological counseling facilities which have not yet been created in Pakistan

Meanwhile, global narcotics patterns are in flux following the breakup of the Soviet Union, which has opened up new sources of narcotics in some Central Asian Republics. There also is a possible vast new narcotics market in China. Finally, the development of a global marketing system has opened up new possibilities for criminal as well as legitimate economic activities.

In his field of narcotics control, Asad says, the concepts of a global village are self-evident, just as they are in immigration and environmental affairs. The difference, Asad believes, is that narcotics use ultimately can be regulated and controlled.