Heroin use among soliders in Afghanistan & Iraq

Salon recently ran an in depth piece on the (not particularly surprising) spread of heroin use among U.S. soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Afghanistan in particular, it's quite easy to come across heroin, since - as you may have heard - Afghanistan supplies much of the world's heroin at this point. Crackdowns on dealers have been limited, and as the reporter notes, it's easy enough to simply walk into shops and ask point blank for a bag of heroin in any amount. And what's motivating drug use among G.I.s?

Many of the addicts returning from Afghanistan, however, point to sheer boredom as the reason for their use. "I had to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, but half the time there was nothing to do," one reservist who served at Bagram complained. Another expressed frustration at the number of contractors sharing their positions. "It really pissed us off that we were there doing the same job as KBR guys who were making three or four times as much. It sucked." Bored and disillusioned with the process and mission at hand, many soldiers turn to heroin to pass the time and escape the monotony.

Of course, PTSD is also expected to surface as a major reason, although for various reasons, statistics about current conflicts take nearly five years to start surfacing in a meaningful fashion in government reports on veteran addiction. But still, the parallels with drug use by G.I.s in Vietnam are hard to miss.

As Mark Benjamin reported in Salon last December, combat in Iraq also shares certain features with combat in Vietnam -- constant patrols punctuated by ambushes, a deteriorating sense of mission -- that are likely to produce high levels of PTSD.

About 2.4 million Americans had served in Vietnam before the U.S. pulled out in 1973. In 1971, while the war was coming to a close, the media reported that the level of heroin addiction was 10 to 15 percent of lower ranking enlisted men. Contemporary researchers concurred, putting the figure at 14 percent.

Those figures were later revised sharply downward, with true addiction now thought to be closer to 4.5 percent.

Researchers still believe, however, that 20 percent of all soldiers who served in Vietnam used opiates at least once. More than half of the veterans now being treated for substance abuse by the VA served during the Vietnam era, but the percentage of opiate addicts who served during the Vietnam era was unavailable.

The number of troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan recently passed 1.5 million early this year. No expert has yet ventured an estimate of what percentage will come home addicted to heroin.

So, yeah, draw your own conclusions. Or, if you're like me, lazily rely on the conclusions of others: in a recent post over on the Slog, Charles Mudede takes note of the conviction of the soldier who raped and killed a young girl, then killed the girl's family. At the soldier's trial, his sister reportedly screamed, ""I hate the government. You people put him (in Iraq) and now, this happened." Mudede notes:

This declaration must not be rejected or understood as purely emotional. There is an amount of reason in her cry. The problem to begin with is the war itself. The war is evil in itself. And because evil is never isolated, never acts alone, or wants to act alone, but, like misery, needs company, needs to multiply, we have to see Spielman's evil in the context of the wider evil, the whole war, the causes of the war, and those who made it possible on grounds that were not in themselves good. Bad begets bad. The road to this particular hell was paved with bad intentions. The rape and murder of the 14-year-old girl is not an orphan; it has a parent, a point of origin, a source ("you people") that made it possible.

Along these lines, lobbing a certain percentage of our soldiers into heroin addiction can also be seen in the context of the wider evil, as part and parcel of the insanity. Undoubtedly many of these soldiers would never have considered heroin use before being put into such preposterous circumstances. Ultimately, a guy like me wants to believe that we're all in control of our own choices about drug use, but I have zero idea whatsoever what serving in one of these conflicts is actually like; PTSD has its own rules, and no one is offering these guys MDMA treatment just yet.