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AIDS follows the Heroin Route

The film is shown on Al Jazeera’s English Channel

Since the intervention in Afghanistan, the West has spent hundreds of millions of dollars setting up local agencies to fight drug trafficking, not just in Afghanistan but also along the main opium and heroin route through the former Soviet republics in Central Asia, Tadzhikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

"It is a fact that HIV spreads in the wake of drugs in Central Asia. Where drugs are smuggled – that's where you find the HIV virus. The drugs go all the way from Afghanistan, through Tajikistan and the rest of Central Asia, which is a hub for drug smuggling, and continues on to purchasers in Russia and Europe," Pia Dyrhagen from Dan Church Aid in Kyrgyzstan says in the film.

The film unravels how government strategies of suppression of information about AIDS, corruption and ignorance have caused HIV to spread more rapidly – and how 30 Imams in Tadzhikistan have decided to break the silence.