How plant-meth from Afghanistan is conquering the world

A group of men sits in a living room in the township of Khayelitsha in Cape Town, South Africa. We're talking on WhatsApp in a video call when one of them holds up a small baggie full of white crystalline powder in front of the screen.

"We've been smoking tik here for years, but this is the new stuff," says Maninja, whose real name is something else. He shakes the sachet and continues, "The price is the same, but the high is different. The other one makes you more hyper, whereas this one makes your body numb."

Tik is South African slang for crystal meth. The drug, also called meth or methamphetamine, has been widely used in South Africa since the 1990s. For the past decade, high-potency meth produced in Nigeria with the support of Mexican narcos has dominated the local market. But now there is competition from 14,000 kilometers away: Afghanistan.

As far as the global drug market is concerned, Afghanistan is best known for its poppy fields. They are the source of up to 90 percent of the world's heroin. For some years, however, meth has also been produced there, partly on a plant basis, and it is turning up in all corners of the world: in South and East Africa, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and the Middle East, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Australia.

For international crime syndicates and corrupt officials, the Afghan meth business means a windfall. In the general chaos of NATO withdrawal, the war-torn and conflict-ridden country is likely to become a narco-state like no other.

Ephedra, also known as sea dew, was long considered a worthless mountain shrub until it was discovered that it could be used to bypass the complicated and expensive manufacturing process of methamphetamine with pseudo-ephedrine, which must be extracted from drugs to make it. The change in the manufacturing process to ephedra herb came about in 2017 and allowed Afghan drug producers to increase the quantity and quality of their products. By the way, because of these properties, ephedra herb is available on prescription in Germany.

"Afghans had to import all the drugs and transport them to remote areas. The cost was so high in some cases that they were making losses," says David Mansfield, who has been observing the Afghan drug economy on the ground for 30 years. "The use of ephedra herb more than halved their production costs. As a result, trade has emerged. A farmer in a desert area grows poppies and buys ephedra herb as a sideline, which he processes into ephedrine and sells in the bazaar - or directly to the labs."

Mansfield's team counted 448 ephedrine labs in just two Afghan districts: Bakwa and Khash Rod. "According to our interviewees, the potential production volume is around 1,000 tons per year. In terms of meth, the country has the potential to be a player in the global market. It is produced at a tenth of the cost incurred in Southeast Asia, but sold at the same price."

Because ephedra herb is a wild mountain shrub and not a chemical that must be imported, the burgeoning meth business has allowed Afghan drug producers to weather poor poppy harvests and the pandemic. "The ephedrine industry has been kind of a life preserver for them," Mansfield says.

The meth is brought in from Afghanistan through established heroin smuggling routes. "There seems to be some overlap with the traditional heroin syndicates and the more recent influx of Afghan meth. They seem to be expanding their portfolio of goods," says Jason Eligh, author of a report published in March of this year that looked at the spread of Afghan meth from the Indian Ocean to East and Southern Africa, among other places. "You can see that in the middlemen involved in the new meth trade. And you can see it even more directly in the frequency of meth and heroin shipments moving in the same vessels and vehicles."

The main route out of Afghanistan is to the west and passes through Iran. Between 2019 and 2020, the amount of meth seized in Iran doubled, with authorities blaming a flood of crystal from Afghanistan. Larger amounts of meth have also been intercepted in Turkey. Another route leads south to the Pakistani part of the Makran coast, where the product is loaded onto ships and taken across the Indian Ocean to the East African coast to Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique. From there, it travels overland to the region's largest drug market: South Africa.

"Meth is cheap here," says Shaun Shelly, who founded South Africa's first harm reduction project in Cape Town, Durban, and Pretoria in 2014. "If you're a regular customer and you buy five grams at a time, it's about 150 rands a gram, the equivalent of 8.75 euros. The maximum price is about 300 rand per gram, which is 17.50 euros."

Although it's not their own product, Nigerian drug lords in South Africa also sell Afghan meth. "This new ephedra-based stuff, I've had it for the past year now. I got it from the Nigerian," Maninja says. "He was looking for new customers, so he told me to give some away."

Pakistan is still primarily a transit country for Afghan meth, but the drug is increasingly being used there as well - its high availability means it's particularly cheap there at around three euros a gram. In April, Indonesian police shot and killed one suspect and arrested 17 others in an operation that led to the seizure of 2.5 tons of Afghan methamphetamine. Several suspects had already been sentenced to death for other offenses, according to Indonesian authorities, and had orchestrated the deal from their cells.

Afghan meth has also surfaced in Australia. The drug, called Ice there, has long been common in Australia and neighboring New Zealand. It usually comes from China and Southeast Asia - more recently, from the Netherlands. In inland Australia, it is distributed by biker gangs. Last year, however, Australian Customs discovered a large shipment of liquid meth in mineral water bottles. A forensic examination revealed that the meth was made with the help of natural ephedrine: So it probably came from Afghanistan.

Because of the gigantic price jump compared to Asia and Oceania, Australia is a tempting target for smugglers. Meth produced in Afghanistan is often brought to the continent via Iran. To do so, criminals persuade blameless members of the Australian-Iranian community under pretenses to have bottles of "hand sanitizer" or "shampoo" sent to them, which are then picked up by accomplices.

The meth business has grown Afghanistan's already gigantic drug economy yet again. It creates work for the people who harvest ephedra herb, transporters, traffickers, millers, lab technicians, smugglers, corrupt officials and the Taliban, who claim a share of the profits. While the profit margin for a kilo of meth in Afghanistan is still relatively small, those who can get the meth abroad make really big money. Once it reaches Iran or Pakistan, the value of the meth begins to rise. "The cost of smuggling it across the borders is great, but those who can move equivalent quantities can also make big profits - especially those who run columns of multiple cars to Bahrāmcha on the Pakistani border," says expert Mansfield.

The latest United Nations World Drug Report suggests that the world's largest producers of methamphetamine are the Mexican cartels, followed by Chinese, Iranian and Afghan producers. But Eligh and Mansfield predict that Afghanistan could soon rise to the top, thanks to low production costs, a mass supply of wild ephedra herb, and the near absence of any law enforcement.

"The reality is, anywhere you find transportation flows of Afghan heroin, you should also look for Afghan meth," Eligh says. "The big international flow of Afghan meth is not going to come in the future. Our research shows it's already here."