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An Afghan woman addicted to drugs looks out from her hut on the outskirts of Herat, in western Afghanistan. Aref Karimi/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

An Afghan woman addicted to drugs looks out from her hut on the outskirts of Herat, in western Afghanistan.

No country grows as many opium poppies or produces as much illicit opium as Afghanistan. In 2013, opium production soared to a record high of 5,500 tons, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

A study published last week adds to a growing body of research showing that Afghanistan also has a high rate of drug usage about 5.1 percent, or 1 in 20 people. Opioids and cannabis were the most popular.

Researchers documented these drug habits by using innovative methodology. Instead of relying on men, as previous studies have done, the researchers turned to female heads of households for information. And they were able to persuade the families they studied to provide hair, urine and saliva samples for laboratory tests to check for use of drugs.

The study, published in The Lancet Global Health, was conducted under the auspices of the State Department's Afghanistan National Urban Drug Use Study. Researchers including Afghan doctors and anthropologists fanned out across 11 provinces and surveyed 2,187 randomly selected urban households about home use of both illegal and prescription drugs. Then they compared the self-reported drug use with the biological tests.

Among the many formidable challenges Afghanistan's new president, Ashraf Ghani, will face is curbing his country's rampant illicit drug production. But the challenge of domestic drug consumption, this study suggests, demands his attention as well.

Linda Cottler, who chairs the epidemiology department at the University of Florida's College of Public Health and Health Professionals and College of Medicine, led the study.

Your study relied on women for information, not men. Why was this important?

We selected the female head of household to be our reporter. We wanted somebody who knew the history of the people who lived there. We were not able to interview men and women together. We wanted to speak to women to give the history because we thought they would know the most. Very few women refused.

More here:
Female Heads Of Household (And Hair) Reveal Afghanistan's Drug Use