August 10, 2009—In a small village in northeastern Afghanistan, it's estimated more than half the residents are addicted to opium. Even the youngest of children are given the drug.

© 2009 National Geographic (AP)

Unedited Transcript

In a village in northeastern Afghanistan, it's just past eight in the morning at Islam Begs house, and the family is already curled up around a burning opium pipe.

They include his one-year-old grandson.

No one looks twice as his aunt blows the opium at him.

It's a common practice here, resulting in rampant child addiction. Residents argue there is no alternative because there is no medicine: there is one drug and that's opium.

Islam Beg at age 65 admits he's ashamed of what he's become.

SOUNDBITE: (Dari), Islam Beg, drug addict "I started taking a smoke until I got addicted to this (opium). I lost my property, I lost my strength, my bravery and now I am laying here with an empty stomach."

Beg's forefathers used to own much of the land in the village and he once had 1,200 sheep. But they were sold, and then the land sold, to pay for opium.

The pipe is passed around and they all take turns to fill their lungs with this deadly substance.

This family of five is typical of the growing number of narcotics addicts in Afghanistan. There are an estimated 150,000 opium addicts and a further 50,000 heroin addicts here.

Decades of war and poverty have instilled a sense of hopelessness in many people here, making narcotics an easydestructive way to deal with an often grim reality.

This village Sarab has a population of fewer than 2,000, and half are already addicts.

Afghanistan has few drug treatment services availablecountry-wide, there are fewer than 200 beds total for drug rehabilitation.

In small villages like this everyone is linked and every family sinks further and further into debt.

SOUNDBITE: (Dari) Jan Begum, drug addict "All I had I lost buying this (opium) you can see nothing has been left for me. I have been sick for the last six months and I don't have money to go to the doctor, all I had I spent on this (opium)."

This woman blows smoke into the face of a little girl.

SOUNDBITE: (Dari), Khanim Gul, drug addict "I blow opium smoke to her face because I want her to sleep well at night. Opium works for us as an alternative for any kind of medicine."

Beg is hopeful that his grandchildren will escape his fate, he believes they're not yet addicted.

But opium addiction in these remote mountain hamlets is so entrenched that whole families, from the smallest toddlers to old men, are held in its vice.