Afghanistan’s fastest-growing drug industry operates from desert outposts in plain view....Wholesalers like Abdulwadood work openly here, moving dozens of kilos of methamphetamine every week. In the middle of his crowded shop, he casually tosses a half-kilo bag of long glassy shards onto the carpet. Its street value in Europa
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...
is tens of thousands of dollars. Abdulwadood will sell it for about $250.

"Every year, sales and production just increase and increase," he said...Behind him the rest of his stock was piled in a corner. He expected to sell the roughly 20 kilos of shisha — the Afghan term for meth — in just a few days.

For decades, the country has been a global hub for opium production, estimated to supply 80 percent of the world’s opiate users. Now its meth industry is growing at breakneck speed, stoking fears among Western experts and officials that, under the Taliban
...mindless ferocity in a turban...
, Afghanistan could become a major supplier as demand rises globally.

Hundreds of meth labs have appeared in Afghanistan over the past six years, according to independent experts, former government officials and drug traders. And more are being built each month as the country’s economic crisis forces Afghans to find new sources of income. The vast majority of meth produced is for export, but an increasing number of Afghans are turning to it as their drug of choice.

The sudden boom in meth production came after narcos discovered a potential bonanza in a native plant called ephedra — known here as oman — which grows wild and is a natural source of the drug’s key ingredient....Cooking meth with harvested ephedra in Afghanistan — while labor-intensive and dangerous — costs a fraction of the price as making the same drug with ephedra extracted from pharmaceuticals, the process used to produce the vast majority of the world’s meth.

Related:
Methamphetamine production: 2021-02-05 Meth Production in Golden Triangle Surging, UN Official Says

Related:
Ephedra: 2021-11-20 Opium Price Spikes in Recent Months: UNODC