June 26, 2026 marks the International Day against drug abuse and illicit trafficking. The worldwide observance, decided by the United Nations General Assembly in 1987, aims at raising the level of awareness in the international community about the dangers of drug abuse, to prevent its spread and to encourage all efforts to combat the menace at international level.
Each year the United Nation Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) selects theme for the day and this year the theme is: “Drug problem persisting, issues new challenges, innovative responses”.
“Pakistan faces multiple challenges as it combats narcotics trafficking, including a spike in violent extremism from the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan and Baloch separatist groups, instability in neighboring Afghanistan, and an ever-developing network of drug trafficking routes.
The majority of narcotics produced in Afghanistan (namely heroin and opium) transit through Pakistan. While overland transit corridors link Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and India, officials assess that mass quantities of drugs transit Pakistan’s maritime domain freely”—International Narcotics Control Strategy Report 2025, (INCSR March 2025).
Terrorism, drugs-for-arms and money laundering, intrinsically linked, pose a substantial threat to global peace and security besides destabilising political and financial stability of many nation States.
The militants and extremists have nexus with criminal networks involved in drug and arms. Evidence available with intelligence agencies confirms that from Taliban to Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), from Al Qaeda to Daesh, the challenge is that of free flow of legal and illegal funds. Until today, international community has failed to sever their financial lifeline.
It is an open secret how drug trade in the post-Taliban Afghanistan was institutionalised—courtesy puppet regime in Kabul and patronisation of warlords in many provinces of Afghanistan.
Once opium started being processed into morphine and heroin inside Afghanistan on a mass scale, it brought tons of money for commanders on the ground.
Controlled democracy in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2021, playing into the hands of more sophisticated naro-enriched commanders, produced devastating results.
It is no more a secret that the Taliban, with whom the USA and allies had always been in negotiation, since 2004, knew how to buy or muscle a vote, which would protect their opium, interests in every election.
Even Afghanistan’s neighbours were making profits from the windfall: criminal groups from Central Asia, says the United Nations (UN), made profits of US$15.2 billion from trafficking of opiates in 2015 that reached $22.8 billion in just two years (‘World Drug Report 2017’). In 2026, these are over $35 billion.
According to the latest ‘World Drug Report 2025’, Tajikistan is by far the worst affected by the drug plague, due to a combination of history, poverty and geography.
In the late 1990s, drug trade was believed to be a source of finance for the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a terrorist group, which had bases in Afghanistan and Tajikistan.
After the war in Afghanistan, the IMU lost most of its influence, but the drug trade continued, with organised criminals taking the place of political or religious activists.
In a survey conducted by the ‘Open Society Institute’, eight out of ten of those polled said, hardly surprisingly, that “the main reason to turn to drug trafficking was to make big money.” Geography also contributed to Tajikistan’s drugs problem: at 1,400km, the country’s border with Afghanistan is longer than its Central Asian neighbours’, and commensurately more difficult to guard.
Afghanistan’s north-eastern province of Badakhshan, an important poppy-growing area, is close to the border with Tajikistan. From there, most narcotics move to Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan before continuing to Kazakhstan and onwards to Russia.
‘Golden Triangle’ source of most dangerous drugs
According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) ‘2025 World Drug report’, the production of opium in Burma increased by 17 percent in 2025 compared to the previous year, reaching a 10-year high of 53,100 hectares, overtaking Afghanistan to become the world’s largest opium producer.
The 2024 UNODC Myanmar Opium Survey: Cultivation, Production and Implications, reported Burma produced 995 metric tons (MT) of opium in 2024, 8 percent less than 1,080 MT in 2023.
Law enforcement seized a record-breaking 190 MT of methamphetamine in the region in 2023, 73 percent of which was seized in the ‘Golden Triangle’ area of Burma, Thailand, and Laos, and most of which was produced in Burma, according to UNODC—INCRS, March 2025
Over the period, three of Afghanistan’s five big drug-producing provinces, Helmand, Uruzgan, and Kandahar, emerged as ‘new Colombia’—where drug lords captured and wrecked governments and the economy alike.
Successive Afghan governments made little progress against poppy growing, except declaring it illegal.
“Afghanistan remains designated as a major drug transit and producing country under the US Presidential Determination on Major Drug Transit and Major Illicit Drug Producing Countries for Fiscal Year 2025. Ongoing efforts to reform drug policies and counter production and trafficking of opium, heroin, methamphetamines and synthetic drugs were deemed sufficient for Afghanistan to avoid being designated as “failed demonstrably” to adhere to obligations under international drug control agreements” (INCSR 2025).
While INCSR 2025, as in earlier reports, has highlighted the spectre of Taliban, it never discussed the widespread poverty in Afghanistan and growing gap between rich and poor.
For many local politicians, such economic factors, along with natural disasters and border problems, constituted far bigger headaches than the Taliban.
Human rights activists contend that the ‘Taliban threat’ in the past and present was intentionally exaggerated to crush all forms of dissent, religious or otherwise. However, even those who were of the view that Islamic radicalism and terrorism were real dangers criticised the US-backed governments for not countering the Taliban through economic initiatives.
Taliban, since ruling Afghanistan for the second time in the wake of withdrawal of American troops in 2021 have proved their will to reduce poppy cultivation and drug trade as highlighted in INCSR 2025: “Afghanistan has maintained a dominant share in global cultivation of opium poppy for decades. Despite this, recent reporting from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and other sources confirmed significant decline in poppy cultivation for a second year since the Taliban’s 2022 narcotics ban.
While UNODC’s cultivation estimate, 12,800 hectares (ha) in 2024, indicates a slight increase from 2023, cultivation remains significantly lower than 2022, when it exceeded 200,000 ha.”
However, the more worrisome situation is the growing number of drug users in Afghanistan, especially females. It is highlighted in INCSR 2025:
Afghanistan is experiencing crisis-level substance abuse, with one of the world’s highest rates of substance use disorders per capita. Anecdotal reporting reflects increased substance use among females that may be linked to the Taliban’s increasing restrictions on the rights of women and girls.
Despite this increase, women and girls represent a very small population of the Taliban-operated drug treatment centers.
America could have played a useful role by acknowledging and supporting Iran’s efforts that waged all out crackdown on warlords and commanders engaged in drug trade. However, the Americans were supporting them.
Independent thinkers were/are thus rightly skeptical of US policies in Afghanistan and elsewhere to counter drug trade and religious fundamentalism.
Chinese have thus valid reasons to view this as ‘hidden US agenda’ for its containment through CIA’s funding of militancy, continuation of the late Zbigniew Brzezinski’s game plan against erstwhile USSR.
Attacks on Chinese nationals in Pakistan, workers, businessmen, and professors by the TTP, Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) and others, allegedly sponsored and funded by Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Mossad, MI6, etc., confirm the future plans of the United States and its allies against China.
All of them want to ensure failure of its flagstaff project, China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), part of global Belt and Road initiative (BRI).
Copyright Business Recorder, 2026
The writer is a lawyer and author, is an Adjunct Faculty at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), member Advisory Board and Senior Visiting Fellow of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE)
The writer, an Advocate Supreme Court, Adjunct Faculty at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), member Advisory Board and Visiting Senior Fellow of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), holds LLD in tax laws
The writer is a corporate lawyer based in the US with extensive expertise in financial regulations, including Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs), corporate governance, and global economic policies. He holds an LLM from Washington University in St. Louis and has completed the Management Development Program at the Wharton School. He has developed regulatory frameworks for North American and South American Financial Institutions and has consulted and trained bureaucrats of different regions. He can be reached at abdulrauff@hotmail.com