In war-battered Afghanistan, finding heroin - a derivative of opium, the country’s main cash crop - is both cheap and easy.

Outside Afghanistan, the street price of heroin produced in remote provinces like Badakhshan, of which Faizabad is the capital, can range from $100-$300 per gram.

Profit margins like that help explain why, more than three years after U.S.-led forces overthrew the Taliban, Afghanistan is again the world’s leading producer of opium and heroin.

According to U.N. estimates, drug exports, much of which end up in Europe, account for more than 60 percent of Afghanistan’s economy. A U.N. report this month warned that record levels of illicit drug production threatened the country’s stability.

The consequences are not only felt in the countries to which most Afghan heroin is exported. Experts warn that addiction, and production, is rising in places such as Badakhshan, a mountainous northern province bordering Tajikistan on a notorious drug-smuggling route to Central Asia and Europe.

There are no statistics on the number of heroin laboratories in the province, but the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) says it appears to be rising fast.

“Unless we deal with it now, Afghanistan will face a major drug-addiction or drug-use problem,” said Doris Buddenberg, head of UNODC in Kabul.

One alarming trend is addiction among Afghan women, and their children, who use heroin as a cheap alternative to painkillers.

“It gave me relief from my headache for about one or two hours…but I didn’t realize that that relief came with more pain,” said Paree Naaz, 34, who was hooked on heroin for a year until she sought help from a local medical worker. Her husband and 10-year-old son were also addicts.

There are no official statistics on drug addiction in Badakhshan, but the numbers are high enough to prompt one local NGO to set up a detox center where men, and sometimes women, voluntarily check themselves in for a month-long treatment.

WAITING FOR SNOWS TO MELT

The UNODC’s Opium Survey for 2004 found the area under opium poppy cultivation in Badakhshan has almost doubled since 2002 to more than 37,500 acres, making it the third largest producer in the country.

Despite threats of eradication, many poppy farmers in Badakhshan are now waiting for the snows to melt by the end of March to usher in this year’s planting season.

“I know it’s illegal, but what can a person do when he’s hungry, his family’s hungry?” said poppy farmer Abdul Raouf, 45. “They can rob or kill people to survive; we plant poppies.”

Over the past four years Raouf has earned about $2,000 a year from his opium harvest, enough to feed not only his wife and three children but many other relatives too.

President Hamid Karzai has declared a jihad, or holy war, against drugs. Last month he unveiled a plan to beef up antinarcotic forces, improve the justice system to enable prosecution of traffickers and run a “credible targeted and verified eradication campaign.”

While the government is resisting U.S. pressures for aerial spraying of poppy crops, which it fears could enrage whole swathes of the countryside and endanger health, some on the front line of the war on drugs say that too much focus on any form of eradication could backfire.

“Usually it has a short-term effect, it drives the prices up for opium, and thus provides the kind of perverse incentive to increased cultivation in the next planting season,” said Buddenberg, citing 2001, when poppy cultivation fell to a low of 20,000 acres after a Taliban ban.

The next year, after the fall of the harsh regime, production soared to 185,000 acres and last year’s UN survey showed 327,000 acres were planted with poppies by no less than 10 percent of the country’s population.

The UN says the solution lies in a long-term development package that includes alternative crops, ensuring a market for those crops, building roads and proper irrigation systems and instituting health and education support.

It also urges consumer countries to put a lid on the demand for opium and heroin.

“As long as demand for heroin worldwide continues, and in some countries continue to increase, there will be production,” said Buddenberg. “The profit margins on this kind of business are just very high so many people will be tempted and will take the risk to do this kind of business.”