The Tajik-Afghan border remains the main transport hub for the supply of heroin to other countries, including Russia. The photo director Peter Shelomovsky visited places where the heroin path runs, and captured the life and everyday life of drug trafficks and those who help them. The material was first published on the Bird in Flight. The border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan stretches almost 1400 kilometers along the Panzh mountain river.

According to the World drug report , published in 2018 by the UN Department, the world production of heroin over the past few years has grown by 65 %, and these are the highest indicators from the start of monitoring the situation. According to him, nine out of ten thousand tons of opium falls on a country that is usually called “New Mexico” today, Afghanistan. The share of this Islamic Republic in the global drug production increased from 20 % in 1980 to 90 % today.

Dr. Robert Newman is one of the pioneers of methadone treatment of drug addicts, who stood at the origins of the programs to reduce harm. In the 1970s, he managed to create in New York the widest system of methadone support of people with heroin addiction in the world. In August last year, he died of injuries received a month earlier during an accident in Bronx. Dr. Newman, also known as Dr. Methadone, was eighty years old.

It is generally accepted that heroin began to take up positions and give the way to more “soft” drugs. Opioids and cocaine were replaced by synthetics in the technicians and marijuana legalized in many countries. Nevertheless, globally heroin is still not inferior in popularity to new psychoactive substances and is no less than cocaine in the Darknet. Russia remains a key market for opioid drugs. Throughout the world among those who use-adolescents, housewives, top managers of IT corporations.

The phrase "heroin knows how to wait" has long become common. So they “do not know” either marijuana or cocaine, due to its chemical properties and effects on the body. At the request of Samizdat, medical journalist Anna Varezhkova explains how this drug works and why often neither exhortations of relatives, nor common sense, nor severe consequences allow a person to completely abandon him, and if he succeeds, he never remains the same.