Underneath a busy bridge in Kabul, among piles of discarded rubbish and a stream of filthy water, lives a drug-ravaged community of homeless men. "It's no place for a human being," said Khudadad, who is 48. "It's not even fit for a dog." Khudadad has been addicted to both heroin and methamphetamine - known as crystal meth - for the past five years. Heroin has long been a problem in Kabul but now many are turning to meth, a cheaper but equally dangerous drug. "When I first started, meth wasn't very common," Khudadad said. "But over the past few years more and more people have begun taking it." A new report released on Tuesday warns that Afghanistan is becoming a significant global producer of methamphetamine. The country's opium poppy fields are already the source of the majority of the world's heroin, and now this report, by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), warns that crystal meth could eventually become just as big an industry. The boom is the result of a discovery by drug traffickers that a plant commonly found growing wild in parts of Afghanistan, ephedra, can be used to create the key component of meth: ephedrine. "The realisation that you could produce methamphetamine from a wild crop in the mountains has been a fundamental gamechanger," said Dr David Mansfield, an expert on Afghanistan's drug industry and lead author of the report. Underneath a busy bridge in Kabul, among piles of discarded rubbish and a stream of filthy water, lives a drug-ravaged community of homeless men. "It's no place for a human being," said Khudadad, who is 48. "It's not even fit for a dog." Khudadad has been addicted to both heroin and methamphetamine - known as crystal meth - for the past five years. Heroin has long been a problem in Kabul but now many are turning to meth, a cheaper but equally dangerous drug. "When I first started, meth wasn't very common," Khudadad said. "But over the past few years more and more people have begun taking it." A new report released on Tuesday warns that Afghanistan is becoming a significant global producer of methamphetamine. The country's opium poppy fields are already the source of the majority of the world's heroin, and now this report, by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), warns that crystal meth could eventually become just as big an industry. The boom is the result of a discovery by drug traffickers that a plant commonly found growing wild in parts of Afghanistan, ephedra, can be used to create the key component of meth: ephedrine. "The realisation that you could produce methamphetamine from a wild crop in the mountains has been a fundamental gamechanger," said Dr David Mansfield, an expert on Afghanistan's drug industry and lead author of the report.