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Posted on 11/07/2001 3:18:01 AM PST by lavaroise

QUETTA, Pakistan (Reuters) - When they're in season, Ghulam Raza smokes scorpions.

He says he dries their stingers in the sun and grinds them, then lights the powdery venom and sucks the smoke deep into his lungs.

"Oh yes," he said when asked if the scorpions make him high. "When I smoke scorpion, then the heroin is like nothing to me."

The place where Raza and other Pakistani junkies smoke dope, chase the dragon or shoot up in the southwestern city of Quetta is a good place to find scorpions.

It is the main cemetery, a dust-filled field of tombstones and corpse-sized mounds of rocks.

A shantytown moulded from the pale dirt of the desert claws its way up a steep mountain slope on one side while Muslim prayers ring out across the city on the other.

In the middle, in the ruins of a building, Raza and a dozen addict friends spend their days.

Some, like Abdul Hai, have been coming here for more than 20 years.

Along with the millions of refugees and hundreds of thousands of dead, they are victims of two decades of war and chaos in neighbouring Afghanistan.

While Afghanistan's ruling Taliban, now being bombed by the United States, banned poppy cultivation in the areas it controls, there is still enough heroin coming across the border that a little bit under a gram in Quetta costs only a little bit more than a dollar.

The Golden Crescent, the rugged frontier country between Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, is the source of more than 95 percent of the heroin consumed in Europe.

But Raza and his crew are not among those who profit from the rich trade.

More disdained than criminalised, the hundreds of junkies in Quetta, capital of Pakistan's parched Baluchistan province, gather away from the chaotic life of the city.

In the cemetery, sometimes one of them will get very stoned and drop into an open grave.

"We are safe here," says Raza, a mechanical engineer, who says he started down the slippery slope of drugs after becoming addicted to pain killers years ago when, he says, he was shot 18 times by police.

The graveyard addicts beg or steal for their drug money. They pay off officials for peace. When they forget, the police come and beat them, they say.

Closer to the centre of town, other Pakistani junkies hide away in an even less salubrious den.

They huddle in small groups, cloaks pulled over their heads, in an open gutter.

WHIFF OF HASHISH

A whiff of hashish barely manages to cut through the stench of sewage clogging the Habib Nala stream that begins as a clear trickle in the nearby mountains before picking up the waste of this city officially of 120,000 but in reality housing perhaps 10 times as many.

Some of the addicts hop around on one remaining leg. Others have viscous scars on their hands. All wear a crust of filth over their shawls and trousers.

Jamaluddin is a whiz with electronic items. He can fix any radio, any television, he says.

"But there is no work and we have nothing to do but smoke," he said.

Jamaluddin has been addicted to heroin for 21 years. Like the other junkies he does not mind the filth of the sewer around him.

"People leave us alone here. Here we can do what we want. If we smoke anywhere else the police come and chase us away."

Naimatullah has two children waiting for him at home. His family hates his addiction and berates him for spending up to 300 rupees ($5) a day on heroin -- a lot of money in this border region.

"But it is a very cruel addiction," he said. "I cannot leave it."

Back at the cemetery, as dusk begins to fall and the desert air suddenly chills, children fly brightly coloured kites, oblivious of the addicts sucking heroin up through pipes made from tin foil.

The junkies are part of the landscape.

"He first one, he first one to come here," Raza said with glazed eyes as he pointed with pride to Abdul Hai, a wizened old man wrapped in a blanket.

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