Opium Brides of Afghanistan

Newsweek

• Farmers in Afghanistan can’t make enough to feed their families on traditional crops.
• Opium pays 10 times as much as wheat or corn, and yet opium farmers still earn about $300 per family member per year (the real money goes to traffickers)
• To get through the year, they often get a loan on the future crop from the traffickers.
• Then eradicators, encouraged by the U.S., destroy the crop.
• Unable to deliver the opium to the traffickers, the farmer faces death.
• So the farmer sells his 10-year-old daughter to be the trafficker’s “bride.”

How’s that drug war going?