By Peter Graff

LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan, June 13 (Reuters) - Dost Mohammad was just eight years old when he began taking drugs while living across the border in Iran.

Over the next two decades he fed his addiction in part by robbing motorists at gunpoint, he explained, raising his hands to mime holding a rifle.

"I couldn't do any work. I would just live off my family," he said.

It was fear for his three sons and two daughters that scared him straight. He is now being treated in a rehab ward at a small narcotics clinic in Lashkar Gah, southern Afghanistan.

"I looked at my children and saw that the future would be dark, and decided to get treatment."

Afghanistan produces the opium used to make 90 percent of the world's heroin. But until recently, says Dr. Rozatullah Zia, head of the drugs treatment clinic, most Afghans thought drug abuse was someone else's problem.

A spiralling epidemic at home is changing perceptions.

"A few years ago, when you went to an area and did a survey, maybe in every 25th family you would find an addict. Now, maybe it's one in 10 families," he said.

"In the past some people had the idea that we grow (opium) and we will send it to Western nations; nobody in Afghanistan is taking it. Now we know."

The epidemic is worst in the south, where opium production has soared in the years since the strict Islamic Taliban were ousted in 2001, Zia said.

He estimated addiction now afflicted up to five percent of the adult population of Helmand province, which accounts for about a third of Afghanistan's opium crop.

In the nearby mountains, fighting still rages between NATO troops and Taliban guerrillas. There is little security and scarce resources for public health projects. But Zia's clinic fights the epidemic one addict at a time.

FIRST TASTE

The clinic has 20 beds for male patients, and also treats about 30 patients, many female, in their homes. A rehab course takes a month. There are 800 addicts on the waiting list.

"We speak to women who tell us: 'For the first time we are growing poppy. And when we collected the harvest I had opium on my hands. That was when I first tasted it'," he says.

"When the children are crying, women put opium in their milk or in their tea."

A small packet of powdered opium can cost as little as 50 afghanis, a bit more than a dollar. But an addict may smoke five or 10 packets a day. Few have access to such cash without stealing, Zia said.

"You can buy it from anyone. Even from the general store."

Zia's clinic boasts a 70 percent success rate. The rate is higher among those whose family members come for visits on twice-weekly family days.

When it opened a year ago, only about half the patients received visits. Today, closer to 90 percent do.

Thirty-year-old patient Allauddin dandled his four-year-old son Iqbal on his knee.

Allauddin's brother, Alakhan, 20, had brought the boy to visit his father in the clinic, where he had passed through the initial detoxification programme and was now in recovery.

"I am very happy and proud of my brother for crossing this step," he said. "When he's cured, then we will be happy."

(To read Reuters reporter Peter Graff's blog from southern Afghanistan, go to: http://blogs.reuters.com/category/from-reuterscom/embedded-in-af ghanistan/) ((Editing by Robert Birsel; Reuters Messaging: robert.birsel.reuters.com@reuters.net))

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