I'm ready to die here. I will die here. Now give me money

Pakistani heroin addict

The 25-year-old then goes in search of the day's first hit of heroin.

Shaukat is one of up to three million heroin addicts in Pakistan.

He has tried and failed to kick the habit, and he knows the source of his addiction.

"It's over there," he slurred, waving a hand in the direction of the Afghan border.

"The stuff is grown and made there and we smoke it. We need it."

Drug money

Pakistan had relatively few addicts at the beginning of the 1980s.

But the American-sponsored war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan saw drug trafficking become an officially approved way of funding rebel activities.

There is an almost limitless supply of heroin

Afghanistan became a massive source of heroin, and a transit point to Europe and America.

Pakistani criminal gangs prospered, and all over the world, addicts got hooked and died.

Demanding 100 rupees ($1.50) from me - enough for a few hours' escape from bitter reality - a young man with no future refuses an offer of food.

He also spurns the help of a former addict who has come with me to this field of desperation in Quetta's Hazaratown district.

My companion is offering to take Shaukat to a rehabilitation programme run by the Milo Shaheed Trust, a local organisation, but he's having no part of it.

"I'm ready to die here," he said, "I will die here. Now give me money."

Chilling story

It is a different world at the trust headquarters, a short walk from Shaukat's hell.

Sixty-five addicts are sitting on the floor, eating lunch, talking and occasionally laughing.

Milo Shaheed was murdered by drug traffickers

"They make their own menu," explained the trust's general secretary, Dr Mohammed Juma.

Dr Juma introduces me to Ghulam Sakhi, an Afghan from Kabul. His story is chilling.

"I started smoking hashish when I was a fighter in the civil war. Later, the Taleban arrested me and put me in jail in Jalalabad," he said.

It was in that city in eastern Afghanistan that Ghulam met the man he simply calls Jabbar, the man who introduced him to heroin.

"Mr Jabbar was Taleban," he explained, "but he was my friend. He was an addict and he wanted someone to get high with. I was the only drug-user in the prison. That was four years ago."

Ghulam says hashish used to help him go for days without food when he was fighting in Afghanistan's civil war.

Heroin was different.

"We were in jail, but we didn't care so long as we could get high. But I was dying and when I got out, there was no way to buy any heroin."

Family rescue

Ghulam's uncle in Quetta was his saviour.

He put his nephew in touch with the Milo Shaheed Trust and Ghulam has been clean for several weeks.

As he speaks, he sits along side other Afghans, Pakistanis, an Iranian and an Omani, all drawn to Quetta to kick the deadly habit.

Addiction counsellors are hoping a new government in Kabul will stop the drug trade

Dr Juma points to a portrait on the wall of the trust's reception centre.

"That's Milo Shaheed," he said. The word "Shaheed" means martyr and the young man in the picture lost his life for his brave stand against the drugs trade in Quetta.

"He was murdered. Milo was shot down just outside our gate for trying to clean the traffickers out of our neighbourhood," said Dr Juma, "This trust is his memorial."

It is a moving tribute. Thousands of people have been weaned off heroin - more than half permanently - and it is now an internationally-respected rehabilitation programme.

Asked what is troubling him at the moment and Dr Juma is quick to answer.

"This war in Afghanistan," he explained. "It could go either way. There could even be more heroin pouring onto the local market, or a new government in Kabul could really end the trade once and for all."

Shuddering at the thought of his first fear coming true, Dr Juma added: "Inshallah, God willing, we'll see peace in Afghanistan soon."