
A Second Shot: Drug Addiction in Afghanistan
Decades of war have left Afghanistan with one of the highest rates of drug addiction in the world, and this film follows the people living inside that crisis after the Taliban's return to power. Cameras move through informal camps and makeshift shelters where addicts, many of them former soldiers or laborers displaced by conflict, describe how opium and methamphetamine became part of daily survival. The Taliban's own response gets screen time too: forced roundups, detox centers with little medical support, and officials framing addiction as a moral failing rather than a public health problem. Interviews with recovering users, family members, and aid workers lay out what treatment looks like when a country has almost no infrastructure for it, and how stigma keeps people from seeking help even when it exists. The film does not offer a solution, only a close look at a population caught between decades of war, a new government's crackdown, and a drug supply that never stopped flowing across the region.