Zakir was only 12 when he started using drugs. “My friend was an addict and one time, he offered me hashish,” he said.
He tried it once, and before he knew it, he had been hooked, and the addiction took over his life. “I used to sell garbage and earn Rs 200 (around US$1.2) per day,” Zakir recalls. “Whatever I earned, I spent on buying drugs. Heroin and ice (colloquial for crystal methamphetamine) were easily available at Rs 250 (around US$1.5).” He just had to seek them out in the Shahkas area of Jamrud, a tribal district of Peshawar, Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan.
“Because of bad company, I became addicted to drugs,” he says.
Zakir fell deep into addiction and often suffered from severe symptoms of withdrawal. “Whenever, I didn’t manage to use drugs, I felt pain in my body”, he says, adding that “when I couldn’t get drugs, I would hurt myself with blades.”
Some three years later, Zakir, now 15, remains hooked on drugs. Recently, his addiction has wrought a different, impossibly vicious kind of devastation on him, one that was such a fundamental violation of his personhood.
For Pakistani children, drug addiction often goes hand-in-hand with the most terrible, unforgivable transgression, stealing not only their health, but also their innocence.
“Some months back,” Zakir begins, he went with his friend to the Kharkhano market, in Peshawar. They met with a man who was supposed to be their supplier of drugs, but Zakir was short on cash. “When I told him I didn’t have money, he [still] asked me to go with him in order to get the drugs.”
“I followed him and he took me to the desolate place where he gave hashish to me,” he continues. The drugs hit him like a ton of bricks, and before long, Zakir felt sleepy. The pusher, it turned out, had been waiting for this. He took advantage of the situation and “the man sexually abused me,” Zakir recalls.
Later, his abuser would take Zakir to Rawalpindi, in Punjab, and turned him over to three other men who likewise offered to give him drugs in exchange for sex. “I turned down their offer, after which they said they would pay me Rs 250 (around US$1.5) for it.”
He rebuffed their second advance, to which the men responded with violence. “They beat me and forcibly sexually abused me,” Zakir says. “I was screaming, crying at the top of my lungs and pleading them to leave me and let me go but my requests fell on deaf ears. During the abuse, they continued to beat me and ask me to be quiet. Otherwise, they threatened to kill me.”
After the incident, Zakir fell deeper into his addiction, turning to drugs “in order to forget the harsh and painful memories.”
Cheap and accessible
Drug addiction is a pressing problem in Pakistan, and over the years, it has only gotten worse, particularly, and painfully, in children.
According to the of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), around 6 percent of Pakistan’s population – just shy of 7 million people – used drugs and other controlled substances in the preceding year. Some 20 percent of the population also used more than one drug.
Despite the grim picture it already paints, the UNODC report points out that its estimates are likely to still underestimate the problem in the country: “taking into consideration the very high levels of dependency among those who were detected, we believe recreational or casual drug use is more common than presented here, but was not detected due to underreporting in the general population.”
Unfortunately, due to age restrictions and ethical issues in conducting studies, as well as a generally weak surveillance mechanism in the country, precise figures regarding drug abuse in Pakistani children are wanting. But according to Imran Takkar, a child rights activist, given the inaction of the government on the matter, children remain exceedingly vulnerable to these vices.
To make things worse, drugs are so cheap and easily available on the streets, which Takkar says contributes to the alarming increase of drug use in children.
Dr. Paveen Azam Khan is the founder and president of non-profit Dost Foundation, which provides social services to street children, prisoners, individuals addicted to drugs, and other marginalized people in the country. Like Takkar, her experience confirms these high-level statistics and estimates from international organizations, but she says things are even more harrowing on the ground.
In 2018, the Foundation treated around 700 adult men addicted to drugs. By 2019, this number had shot up to 1,300. During the same time period, the number of children attending for treatment also grew, from 231 in 2018 to 256 in 2019. At present 33 children are seeking treatment at Dost.
Pakistan lies close to the core of the Balkan drug route, and in many ways acts as a hub for drug shipments on their way to Iran, Turkey, West Europe, and sometimes even as far out as China, first coursing through Southeast Asia. The source for most of these substances, particularly heroin and opiates, is Afghanistan, which courses billions of dollars’ worth of drugs through Pakistan.
This is how Jehangir, 17, got his addiction. Jehangir used to work in one of the shoe factories in Hayatabad, in the outskirts of Peshawar, where he would tender a month’s worth of work for Rs 24,000 (around US$145). There he met a colleague, who eventually became his supplier. In exchange for Rs 450 (around US$2.7), Jehangir would have the ice fix he needs.
“Whenever, I used ice, I would work overtime,” Jehangir says. Back then, he lived in the factory, and on Fridays, his only day off, “I used to go to Bara, a tribal area adjacent to Peshawar and bordering Afghanistan to buy hashish, ice, and alcohol.”
“I’d consume it in the fields with my other drug-addicted friends,” he recalls.
One time, Jehangir was hanging out with two other men in these fields, enjoying the hashish and alcohol they had just bought, when all of a sudden, one of the men tried to overpower him and attempted to sexually abuse him. Luckily, “I made a noise and passers-by rescued me,” he says.
Before long, Jehangir himself started pushing drugs, and he would get his supply from Kharkhano market, the same market where Zakir first met his abuser. Apart from selling the drugs, “I also use it myself,” Jehangir says. Eventually, “when my parents came to know that I was indulged in drug addiction, they beat me and got me admitted in Dost Foundation for treatment.” That he was nearly assaulted, however, went un-mentioned.
Cogs of justice
Like Jehangir, Zakir also tried to keep his assault secret. Somehow, he recalls, “I managed to escape from them and returned to Peshawar by bus. I didn’t tell the police or even my parents about the abuse because of the taboo and shame associated with it.” Since then, Zakir has been undergoing rehabilitation at the Dost Foundation. But sadly, silence by shame remains the norm in Pakistan.
According to Dr. Khan of the Dost Foundation, drug abuse and sexual abuse of children interrelated. Citing a 2003 study by Sahil, a non-profit working against child sexual abuse, Khan points out that more than half of children had used drugs before they were victimized. Moreover, a similar proportion of children started using drugs after the had been abused.
Imran Takkar, the child rights activist, laments that as if it weren’t bad enough that children were already highly vulnerable to abusers, survivors would also rather keep quiet about their experiences, because they believe that bringing these out into the open could tarnish their families’ name.
In turn, many incidents go unreported to law enforcement, and perpetrators learn that they don’t necessarily have to suffer the consequences of their actions.
Pakistan, Takkar points out, is signatory to the International Conventions and Declarations on drug control, but if the experiences of Zakir and Jehangir are any indication at all, it’s clear that much more needs to be done.
In November last year, the country’s Prime Minster approved, in principle, a new law that would punish sexual offenders with chemical castration and hanging. The country has other strict policies in place, including 2021 amendments to the Control of Narcotics Substances Bill, which outlaw the manufacturing and selling of ice, making such acts punishable by the death penalty. Amendments to the Anti-Rape and Pakistan Penal Code ordinances have also codified similarly strong consequences, all in hopes of deterring these types of heinous crimes.
But according to Abdul Aziz, an advocate from Peshawar, the problem is that the crime isn’t reported in the first place. The stigma against victims is just too strong. And even when victims brave through the shame, law enforcement is typically sloppy, often tampering with evidence and committing critical mistakes in investigations.
In a country where drug abuse and sexual assault have become so intimately linked with each other, this environment of silence and stigma can only serve to harm the most vulnerable. And ultimately, the cogs of justice turn very slowly for these survivors, if at all. ●
Mahwish Qayyum is a freelance journalist based in Pakistan. Her work has been published in international news outfits such as Vice News, Newsweek, and Al Jazeera.