Screening: Opium Brides

Followed by a Q&A with reporter Najibullah Quraishi.
Afghanistan produces around 90 percent of the world’s opium, fueling the global heroin trade, funding terrorist groups like the Taliban and bringing billions of dollars a year into the country’s economy.
Award-winning Afghan journalist Najibullah Quraishi travels deep into the Afghan countryside to reveal the deadly bargain local farmers are being forced to make in order to save their own lives. Opium Brides exposes the dreadful abuse of young Afghan girls by drug traffickers closely allied to the Taliban. Through interviews with local villagers, Quraishi learns that drug smugglers have been paying local farmers to grow opium, which the smugglers then use to produce heroin.
Now that the government has been destroying the farmers’ opium crops through the eradication program, the drug smugglers are returning and giving farmers a choice: Pay back the money, or give one of the family’s young daughters as a “bride.”