Addicts light up in the former Russian Cultural Center. The buildings are bombed-out shells with no electricity, running water or sanitation. Drug users buy heroin at the entrance to the buildings, in plain sight of Afghan anti-narcotics police. Around 650 addicts live at the center, and an additional 1500 more go there each day to buy and use drugs.

Muhammad Rahim, 28, sits in an acute detox room in the emergency detox center at the former Russian Cultural Center. The emergency detox center began in an effort to stem the daily deaths occurring among the drug-addicted population living on the sprawling cultural center grounds. It is Muhammad's first time trying to quit his heroin addiction.

The detox center is the largest ad-hoc drug treatment center in Afghanistan, serving 650 residents with a daily hot meal, detoxification assistance, medical aid and counseling.

Each of the former Russian Cultural Center's 650 residents, most of whom are addicted to heroin, will receive soup, bread and a little fruit for lunch at the the emergency detox center.

An addict receives the his first and only meal of the day. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that roughly two people died each day on the cultural center's grounds during the winter.

Surrounded by her six children, Karima, 30, smokes heroin and opium in her one-room home in Kabul. She is addicted to heroin, opium and hashish, and an outreach team from the Nejat Center, a community drug treatment program, has been trying to convince her to quit.

Karima's 12-year-old daughter Fahima sits calmly while her grandmother and mother giggle from the effects of opium and heroin. Sometimes Fahimas's mother makes her go out and buy her drugs for her. Neither Fahima nor her five siblings attends school. With tacit approval from her mother, Fahima has also started to smoke heroin and opium.

Fahima, right, answers the door of her one-room home. Fahima has kidney stones and suffers from malnutrition. Her hair is falling out in chunks, and a bald spot is clearly visible on the back of her head.

Karima reaches for a cooking pot. Her addiction means that sometimes there is just enough food to stifle the hunger pangs, but never enough for the children to thrive. And sometimes no food at all.

Raisa, 5, waits while her mother Karima dices onion and potato for a simple soup for lunch. Karima tried to sell Raisa only a couple weeks before because she was so desperate for drugs. 

A Winnie-the-Pooh doll sits haphazardly next to the cigarettes Karima uses to smoke heroin in her single room. The Afghan government is doing little to treat its own addict population, and international funding for treatment lags way behind opium eradication.