Afghanistan is the world’s single largest opiate producing country; the big exports being Opium, Heroin, and black market editions of Codeine and Morphine.
I had a hard time finding a decent set of consequence related statistics for opiate consumption. Opiate use is not a popular concern….but I did find enough to talk about:
Annually, approximately 16,260 people die of Heroin overdose within the United States. That comes up to about five and a half nine-elevens a year…and gaining. These statistics do not include fatalities as a result of other black-market opiates (more than 25 alkoloids can be extracted from poppies). According to multiple sources, individuals who use heroine have a mortality rate between 6 and 20 times higher than their non heroine using peers (although, these last numbers are compounded by lifestyle habits: dirty needles (HIV, Hepatitis) and drug related violence).
The United States at just over 300M residents has about 1/22th of the world’s 6,602M population. Opiate use is prevalent world wide…with it’s greatest consumption per capita being in Asia, but with the greatest heroin use per capita being in Europe. To be conservative we will cut the US statistics in half and then cut them in half again, and say for argument’s sake that only 1.35 people per 100,000 die internationally from opiate use (though the real figure is surely higher!). This gives us just over 244 fatalities a day or one nine-eleven every twelve days!
Sources:
National Institute on Drug Abuse
Office of National Drug Control Policy
European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction