In a sign of desperation, Afghans are giving their hungry children medicines to sedate them and selling organs to survive.
"Our children keep crying, and they don't sleep. So we go to the pharmacy, get tablets and give them to our children so that they feel drowsy", Abdul Wahab told the BBC.
Reporting just outside Herat, the country's third largest city, in a settlement of thousands of small mud houses, lots of the men confirmed they all do the same and showed packets of alprazolam, also known as Xanax.
Despite the risks of giving the tablets to young children, such as liver damage, the men feel they have no choice.
The BBC found that five tablets cost around 10 pence which is the same price of a piece as bread.
Ammar (not his real name), who is in his twenties, showed the BBC a large scar across his abdomen from the front of his body to the back and explained how he sold his kidney in exchange for around 270,000 Afghanis (£2,495).
"There was no way out. I had heard you could sell a kidney at a local hospital. I went there and told them I wanted to. They did some tests, then they injected me with something that made me unconscious. I was scared but I had no option", he told the BBC.
He said most of the payment went towards money he had borrowed to buy food for his family.
Another young mother also sold her kidney to repay debt they owed for buying a flock of sheep. She said the money was not enough and now they are being forced to sell their two-year-old daughter.
"The people we have borrowed from harass us every day, saying give us your daughter if you can't repay us," she told the BBC.
The news comes as fourteen people were publicly lashed in a football stadium in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday.
This horrifying event was the first time that the Taliban invited Afghans to witness brutal corporal punishment in since they last ruled the country in the 1990s.
“Fourteen people, including three women were lashed in the presence of scholars, authorities and people… for different sins including adultery, robbery and other forms of corruption in a football stadium in Logar [province],” said the Taliban’s Supreme Court.
At least 19 people were also lashed 39 times each in the northeastern Afghan city of Taloqan on November 11 for allegedly carrying out adultery and theft.
