Afghanistan Dispatch: Addicted

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villian

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After the nurses resuscitated Abdul Bashir with a shot of naloxone, an opiate receptor blocker, the doctor took me through his ward. The cots along the green walls streaked brown with old blood, or maybe excrement, were mostly empty. In two different rooms, three mothers sat cross-legged on cots next to their children. The doctor made macabre introductions: A two-year-old child with meningitis and opium addiction. A seven-month-old baby with pneumonia and opium addiction. A month-old baby with giardiasis and opium addiction. “They are either giving opium to them when they cry, or the child is ingesting it with the mother’s milk,” the doctor said. “We will treat them here, but when they go home…”

The doctor looked at Abdul Bashir. The infant, hooked up to a drip of IV fluid, was asleep and breathing normally. “Every month we receive two or three babies like this, not breathing, overdosed,” he said. “It is very common for people in this area to give opium to children when they cry. If he had gotten here twenty minutes later, he wouldn’t have lived. Last year, we had three children who were brought here dead.”
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http://www.tnr.com/article/world/85408/afghanistan-opium-united-states-united-nations?page=0,1
 
Mora Fiend said:
It seems the media loves to report about babies that are harmed by drugs, but I hardly ever see any report about fetal alcohol syndrome.
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Not sure I see the point you are trying to make. Afghantistan has an epidemic of using opium as a cure all for children. I'm sure if there was an epidemic of parents giving their children liquor to stop them from crying every day there would be an article about that as well.

Fetal alcohol syndrome comes about by drinking while pregnant. This article is about children getting high every day and developing an addiction (or dying from overdose). While the ideas may be similar on some level, you really are comparing apples and oranges.
 
Perhaps Villan, but I highly doubt the 1 month old and the 7 month old are going out and copping opium every day, unless they start walking REALLY young in Afghanistan. The comparison I am trying to make is the poor decisions that parents make is what is harming their child, not the opium.
 
Mora Fiend said:
Perhaps Villan, but I highly doubt the 1 month old and the 7 month old are going out and copping opium every day, unless they start walking REALLY young in Afghanistan. The comparison I am trying to make is the poor decisions that parents make is what is harming their child, not the opium.
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Yep.

Although 100 years ago we were doing the same thing in the United States.

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Damn that's fucked up. Not surprising really, but fucked up. Aren't they making over 90% of the world's ope now?
Don't want this to come off the wrong way, but I'd consider them a little "behind" in some ways - and I seem to remember hearing my parents' generation considered whiskey good for a crying baby, hell before that Bayer heroin from CVS was likely considered fine.

People living in afghanistan, being pregnant, and being ignorant about opiates causes this unfortunately. Wonder what would be the smartest fix here? Get the kiddies onto methadone once they're not OD'ing? (seriously though, that would be far better than putting a heavily opioid-dependent baby into further withdrawals in such a state)

/also been wondering if we're going to see a return of the nam-vets/heroin phenomena given it must be WAY more available in afghanistan than it was in nam.
 
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Makes you wonder how many children died of this before they had naloxone on hand to reverse an OD...

Either way, I'm all for the very liberal use of opiates, but I definitely draw the line at dosing children. I'd say there needs to be some sort of wide-spread education about the dangers of doing so, but given the current situation in Afghanistan I'm not sure how effective that would be.
 
I draw the line there too, but I understand why rural afghani's don't.
Would you draw the line there if the kid was already opioid-tolerant due to breast milk?
(Should mention I may not have felt how I do, had I not read that it's preferable to keep a late-term mother on opioids instead of instigating a detox, apparently it's far better to keep her and her baby on than have her try to get them off..)
 
The Afghanis are 100 years behind like we were when we would give our babies whisky for teething & other strong stuff before that. They need to be educated about opiates.
 
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