JATA, Afghanistan -- The village mullah and his superior are smeared with fresh opium sap. It is harvest time, and the holy men are laboring in their poppy field, breaking the laws of Islam and Afghanistan to ease their poverty.

As the day wanes, they wait, fingers aching, for the ubiquitous young men who cross the countryside on shiny new motorbikes, buying up the deadly harvest reaped by local farmers.

"Of course it bothers me," said Mohammad Sarwar, 49, the mawlawi, or authority on Islamic teachings, at the mosque in this tiny northeastern village. "But we have to cultivate it in the current situation where we've had to borrow money, sell household items and don't have enough to eat. This is an emergency."

The drug trade in Afghanistan is growing more pervasive, powerful and organized, its corrupting reach extending to all aspects of society, according to dozens of interviews with international and Afghan anti-narcotics workers, police, poppy farmers, government officials and their critics.

Afghanistan, the world's largest opium producer last year, appears poised to produce another bumper crop. In rural areas where wheat has historically been the dominant crop, fields of brilliant red, pink and white poppies are proliferating. Many poor farmers, who complain that the Afghan government and other countries have failed to ease their economic woes through legal means, say that they are growing illegal opium poppies for the first time.

At the same time, drug laboratories where raw opium is processed into morphine or heroin -- once rare in Afghanistan -- are sprouting at an unprecedented rate, police and anti-narcotics workers say. Many authorities appear less inclined to combat new drug syndicates than to share in their profits. The crude but money-making factories are largely condoned by elders, unmolested by police and guarded by militiamen and their commanders.

In the district of Daryian in Badakhshan province, police chief Abdul Qadeer Raashed said in an interview that he had shut down and destroyed all drug laboratories in villages under his control more than one month ago, after local competitors accused him of running labs and smuggling drugs.

But a Washington Post reporter, who insisted on touring the supposedly defunct laboratories with Qadeer on short notice, found the four fire pits of one lab, at a home in the village of Langar, still hot to the touch, with firewood smoldering outside.

Hidden in a storeroom and outbuildings -- along with the half-eaten lunches of people who had clearly been working there a short time before -- were the supplies and equipment needed to produce morphine and heroin. Among them: dozens of empty oil barrels and still-damp vats for mixing and boiling, sacks of lime, more than 50 bags of chemicals such as ammonium chloride and filters for refining.

In the main house was a roster listing workers' names and duties, instructions for using a satellite telephone, and -- hidden under a mound of carpets and cushions -- bags of a brown powder that appeared to be heroin. While the reporter searched the property, Qadeer stood by, looking miserable.

"Come back in 48 hours," Qadeer said, "and I promise you, this will all be gone."

In Badakhshan province, known for the tenacity of its opposition to the Taliban and the beauty of its mountainous terrain, the drug trade is exerting a gravitational pull on the local economy and power structure.

The increase of poppy fields and drug labs has driven the price of a day's labor from about $3 to $10 -- beyond the reach of farmers tending low-priced legal crops, but affordable for poppy growers.

The rising labor costs have also stalled road and bridge projects and other reconstruction efforts that are desperately needed in the province, which is poor even by Afghan standards, said Mohammad Hakim, 30, political officer for the Badakhshan office of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan.

"Almost all the U.N. projects have stopped because there is no labor," he said. "People are working with the poppy. Roof construction, school projects -- all stopped. Everybody is affected."

Last year, Hakim said, several militia commanders scattered throughout the province tried to halt the spread of poppy cultivation and drug-processing labs. "This year, there was only one," he said. "Next year, maybe none. In some districts, the commander is the owner of the factory. The people who are getting involved are getting powerful."

Cmdr. Fazel Ahmad Nazari, head of criminal investigations for the Badakhshan police, said: "Day by day, it's growing more organized. If it keeps going like this we won't be able to combat it, ever."

As the drug trade spreads, law enforcement efforts to combat it remain rudimentary.

The fledgling national government's new Counter-Narcotics Department is still struggling to establish itself. Kabul-based anti-narcotics police units are largely in the planning and training stages. No one is seriously investigating official drug corruption. "We don't have the capacity yet," said Mirwais Yasini, director general of the Counter-Narcotics Department.

In the eastern province of Logar, convoys of trucks loaded with drugs and guarded by men armed with semiautomatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenade launchers travel toward the Pakistani border at least two or three times a week. The police chief says that his men don't have the firepower to stop them and that some well-armed militiamen are in league with the smugglers.

"It's out of our control," said Maj. Gen. Noor Mohammad Pakteen, who has been a law enforcement officer for 36 of his 59 years. "The drug mafia is getting worse daily. When nobody will help us, we can't do anything. ... I'm so frustrated, actually, I'm ready to leave my job."

Police across the country not only do not have the might to confront well-armed drug smugglers, they also lack such basics as cars, telephones and radios.

In mountainous Badakhshan, the police have just one vehicle, a pickup truck. When police at headquarters in the provincial capital, Faizabad, receive a tip about a smuggling operation in a far-flung district, Nazari often has to send an officer on foot. A round trip can take a month and leave an officer in trouble with no way to call for help.

"These mafia who are very active in Afghanistan have everything," Nazari said. "They have motorbikes, pistols, mobile phones and tight communication. The police who are trying to combat those smugglers have nothing."

Police in Badakhshan are supposed to receive a monthly salary of up to 1,500 afghanis -- about $30. But the national government has failed to pay them for months at a time.

A demoralized police officer is ripe for bribes. "For $100, he'll be hired," Nazari said. "The drug smugglers will give him some money and tell him that even though he knows about a laboratory he should say that he doesn't. It's happened lots of times."