英语高级视听_听力原文_Unit4Afghanistan.doc

Afghanistan: Addicted To Heroin By Daniel Schorn Watch the Segment ? Web Extras Afghanistans Heroin Trade Karzai On The Opium Problem For much of 2005, the news out of Iraq has overshadowed what has been going on in Afghanistan, where 18,000 U.S. troops are still fighting and dying along the Pakistan border in battles with the Taliban, al Qaeda and other Muslim extremist groups. The rest of Afghanistan, at least compared to Iraq, appears relatively peaceful. But the country is facing another threat to its stability — its growing addiction to the production and trafficking of heroin, which is controlled by some of the most powerful people in the country. Correspondent Steve Kroft reports. Afghanistan is now the worlds largest exporter of heroin, and the opium used to produce it, supplying 87 percent of the world market. And it is creating an infrastructure of crime and corruption that threatens the government of President Hamid Karzai. The heroin trade begins with fields of opium poppies罂粟 grown in almost every province of Afghanistan. Last year, according to the U.S. state department, 206,000 hectares公顷（1公顷等于1万平方米） were cultivated, a half a million acres, producing 4,000 tons of opium, most of which was converted into 400 tons of illegal morphine and heroin in laboratories around the country. How much opium and heroin is that? It is not only the largest heroin producer in the world, 206,000 hectares is the largest amount of heroin or of any drug that I think has ever been produced by any one country in any given year, says Robert Charles, who until last spring was assistant secretary of state助理国务卿 for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, overseeing anti-drug operations in Afghanistan. Charles says Afghanistan is producing more heroin than Colombia is producing cocaine. After 25 years of war, it is the countrys main cash crop经济作物, contributing nearly three billion dollars a year in illegal revenues to the Afghan economy, which equals 50