“This has never been witnessed before in the history of Afghanistan,” said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, the departing leader of the Afghanistan office of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which produces the annual survey.

Image Credit The New York Times

At the same time, opium crop eradication efforts have flagged, with the overall area targeted down 24 percent from the previous year.

Still, Afghan law enforcement officials insisted that they were having an effect. “Last year alone we confiscated 14 percent of the narcotics produced in Afghanistan and arrested 4,000 smugglers, including small, midrange and major smugglers,” said Maj. Gen. Khalilullah Bakhtiyar, head of operations for the Afghan government’s Counter Narcotics Police. He noted that official Afghan government figures for 2013, however, were not yet available since the year has not finished.

The record opium figures have come despite billions of dollars and years of effort by the international community to reduce the number of poppies grown in Afghanistan. It has been one of the rare unifying issues in the region, drawing in countries like Russia and Iran that are outside the NATO-led military coalition. Both have extremely high heroin addiction rates, most of it attributed to drugs from Afghanistan.