Ambassador Haidari Highlights the Growing Vulnerability of Displaced Men to Addiction and Exploitation in Afghanistan’s Neighborhood at International Conference
By Luisa Sinisterra
At the International Conference on Countering Narco-Terrorism, organized by the Indic Researchers Forum in partnership with Avellon Intelligence on April 10–11, 2026, Ambassador Ashraf Haidari, founder and president of Displaced International, highlighted a dimension of the narcotics crisis too often overlooked: the growing vulnerability of displaced men in Afghanistan’s neighborhood to addiction, exploitation, and abuse. Speaking on April 11 during Session 4, “The Golden Triangle: Opium, Synthetic Drug Expansion and Regional Security,” he argued that forced migration must be understood not as a side issue, but as one of the human frontlines where narcotics, trauma, exploitation, and insecurity converge.
A Crisis Bigger Than Trafficking Routes
Haidari’s remarks widened the conference frame beyond seizures, smuggling corridors, and terror finance. “We often discuss narcotics in the language of seizures, trafficking routes, criminal syndicates, and profits,” he said. “We discuss terrorism in the language of financing, recruitment, and destabilization. And we discuss forced migration in the language of borders, displacement figures, and humanitarian need. But for millions of displaced people, these are not separate issues.” The warning resonates at a time when UNHCR reports that 117.3 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced by mid-2025.
His central point was that displacement creates the conditions in which addiction can take root. Refugees and migrants often arrive in exile carrying trauma, grief, humiliation, fear, and uncertainty, only to encounter exclusion from legal work, social isolation, and weak access to care. For many vulnerable displaced men, especially poor, undocumented, or unemployed young men living on the margins, narcotics can become both an escape and a trap. “Addiction does not emerge in a vacuum,” Haidari said. “It grows where despair is abundant, and narcotics are cheap.” That concern is consistent with the World Health Organization’s assessment of refugee and migrant mental health, which notes that conflict exposure, violence, exclusion, and barriers to care heighten mental-health risks across the migration journey.
From Displacement to Exploitation
Haidari described displaced people who fall into dependency as “double victims” — first uprooted by war, persecution, poverty, or state collapse, and then consumed by “a second form of violence: addiction driven by dispossession, unemployment, untreated trauma, and abandonment.” His framing aligns with wider evidence that the health of refugees and migrants is shaped not only by pre-flight trauma but also by post-arrival deprivation, exclusion, and lack of services.
That framing gave the speech its sharpest edge. Rather than treating addiction as an individual failing, Haidari located it within structures of abandonment that make displaced people easier to exploit. He warned that a refugee struggling with addiction may be “more easily recruited as a courier, manipulated by traffickers, drawn into petty criminality, or trapped in the overlap between migrant precarity and organized illicit networks.” His intervention thus connected the human consequences of displacement to the conference’s wider concern with narcotics, organized crime, illicit finance, and militancy.
As he put it, “Untreated addiction in displaced communities is not merely a private tragedy. It can become a public health crisis, a social fracture, and a security risk.” That broader regional context matters because the UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s Afghanistan Opium Survey 2025 points to changing cultivation patterns alongside continued concern over trafficking dynamics and the evolution of regional drug markets.
The Afghan Case and a Call for Prevention
Haidari illustrated the argument through the case of Afghan refugees and migrants in Iran and Pakistan, where decades of war, recurrent displacement, and legal precarity have left millions living on the margins. He said many Afghans have contributed meaningfully to host societies, yet too many have also remained “underpaid, stigmatized, monitored, and denied genuine stability.” For poor and unemployed refugees, especially young men cut off from lawful opportunity and community support, he warned, drugs can become “dangerously accessible” because they offer temporary escape from “humiliation, loneliness, boredom, and despair.”
Haidari also challenged punitive responses that criminalize addicted refugees and migrants rather than treat them. He warned that addiction is too often handled “not as a medical and psychosocial condition, but as a criminal identity.” He then turned to return and reintegration, arguing that deportation is no solution when people are sent back to settings marked by economic collapse, weak health systems, and inadequate rehabilitation. Referring to the recent attack on a Kabul rehabilitation center, he said: “A place meant for treatment became a place of mass casualty. A place of recovery became another battlefield.” Reuters reporting on the March 2026 strike underscored the devastation, including the loss of one of the few structured addiction-treatment spaces available to recovering patients.
He closed with a broader policy message: displaced people must be treated as central to prevention, not peripheral to strategy. That means linking refugee protection, rehabilitation, psychosocial care, livelihood support, and cross-border cooperation. “A refugee battling addiction is not an enemy to be discarded,” he said. “He is not collateral. She is not a nuisance to be pushed out of sight.” In the speech’s closing line, Haidari distilled the argument into a single warning: “The struggle against narco-terrorism will not be won by force alone. It will also be won by whether we can reduce the supply of despair on which criminal networks depend.”
