Here’s a shocking example of an anti-drug poster campaign from the United Nations’ Offices on Drugs and Crime targeting the use of opium in Kabul, Afghanistan.

I guess this is one way to ease the pain for a teething baby?

(via reddit)

 
As the vote-counting begins today in Afghanistan, I’m reminded that politics, by design, can often assume dimensions that are both abstract and confusing.  I think we can all agree, though, those qualities are completely missing from the accompanying photos and this description of the living conditions in Saba:

Open the door to Islam Beg’s house and the thick opium smoke rushes out into the cold mountain air, like steam from a bathhouse.  It’s just past 8 a.m. and the family of six—including a 1-year-old baby boy—is already curled up at the lip of the opium pipe.  Beg, 65, breathes in and exhales a cloud of smoke.  He passes the pipe to his wife.  She passes it to their daughter.  The daughter blows the opium smoke into the baby’s tiny mouth.  The baby’s eyes roll back into his head.  Their faces are gaunt.  Their hair is matted.  They smell.  In dozens of mountain hamlets in this remote corner of Afghanistan, opium addiction has become so entrenched that whole families—from toddlers to old men—are addicts.  The addiction moves from house to house, infecting entire communities cut off from the rest of the world by glacial streams.  From just one family years ago, at least half the people of Sarab, population 1,850, are now addicts.

 
From The Sacramento Bee: Afghanistan—Village of Addicts