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."
Drug WarRant @ March 31, 2008