Afghanistan importing drug experts

SHAH MARAI/AFP/Getty Images

As if we needed more bad news from Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s drug lords are now recruiting foreign chemists to help refine raw opium into heroin, the U.N. warns:

Most of the chemists come from Iran, Turkey and Pakistan, the UN says, and are going to some of Afghanistan’s most troubled areas to oversee the mixing of poppy resin with smuggled industrial chemicals to produce heroin of the highest quality.

Christina Orguz, Afghanistan country director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said Afghanistan’s drug lords were behaving like businessmen and recruiting the best talent available. Afghanistan now supplies more than 90 per cent of the world’s heroin.

The refining process requires large amounts of otherwise-legal chemicals, smuggled across the border into Afghanistan. Earlier this year, a shipment was seized in — you guessed it — Pakistan.