- Our children just cry and can't sleep.

So we go to the pharmacy, buy tablets and give them to the children to make them sleepy, Abdul Wahab told BBC News.

When asked how many people drug their children to make them sleep, he answers "many of us, all of us".

Abdul Wahab lives in northwestern Afghanistan, just outside the country's third largest city, Herat.

The family lives in an area with thousands of small houses built of mud and sand, a settlement that over the decades has grown and filled to the brim with people fleeing war and natural disasters.

Giving the benzodiazepine to a one-year-old

Another man gives Alprazolam, a benzodiazepine commonly prescribed to treat severe anxiety and panic attacks in adults, to all six of his children, including the youngest son who is only one year old.

Most of the desperate parents the BBC spoke to are day laborers who every day look for new ways to put food on the table.

"Better to die than live like this"

A young mother says that she has already sold a kidney to pay off the family's debts, but that now they must also sell the two-year-old daughter.

- Sometimes I feel that it would be better to die than to live like this, says the woman's husband.

After the Taliban took power in August 2021, foreign money abruptly stopped flowing into the country.

Together with international sanctions against the Taliban regime, the economic collapse was a fact, which has led to the country's daily wage workers now mostly going unemployed.

On the days they actually find work, they earn around 100 afghani, just under 12 Swedish kronor.

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