While Ravshan was thousands of miles away from the United Nations drug summit in New York last week, he is exactly the kind of person President Clinton and other world leaders will have to reach if they are to make a dent in the world's multi-billion-dollar drug trade, as they have pledged.

Ravshan once was a captain of a corps of drug addicts and unemployed women, conscripted to work as smugglers. With tight wads of opium and heroin nestled at the bottom of cheap Chinese bags, Ravshan's team would fan out across the grassy Asian steppe. They traveled by train and bus, following the course of the ancient Silk Road, once traversed by camels laden with the luxuries of the East.

These days, the old Silk Road has become a modern-day Heroin Trail, allowing opium harvested in Afghanistan to reach markets in Europe and China. In fact, experts say more narcotics now pass through this region than through the so called Southeast Asian "Golden Triangle" countries of Myanmar and Thailand.

About 220 pounds of processed opium is sumggled across Central Asia each week, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. Just as the new Central Asian states are struggling to build stable democracies, the drug trade threatens to turn them into "narcocracies," the institute warned.

Osh, a 3,000-year-old trading post at the base of the craggy Pamir Mountains, has become a major hub on the new drug route. Among its 500,000 people - many now unemployed - are plenty who are willing to travel the Heroin Trail for a $100 fee. Many of these new smugglers are women, who make the best smugglers because police in this Muslim-dominated culture are reluctant to search them.

Known locally as "Khanka", opium has long been part of the culture of Central Asia. But with the break-up of the Soviet Union, the erosion of government authority, and the ensuing economic collapse, khanka has become a driving force in the region, creating a booming new industry and thousands of new addicts like Ravshan.

Until Ravshan, 35, checked himself into a drug clinic last month, his drug caravan was transporting as much as 11 pounds of narcotics on each trip to Russia's big cities. He began smuggling drugs after he lost his job in 1991 when his factory went bust. During his five years as a smuggler, he said he never failed to make a delivery.

"I was hightly motivated," he recalled with a bitter glance at the needle marks running down his bony arms.

Ravshan said he finally found his own "interior power" - and the $154 fee - to drag himself in for treatment. But there are still dozens of other like him, all moving westward with their plastic wrapped sacks of drugs.

"It used to be just a bad habit here, but now it's big business," said kamil Abdurakhmanov, head of the Osh police department's anti-drug squad. The police have been trying to contain the torrent of drug traffic with a staff of 19 and a single Russian-made car.

"There are 100 places in Osh where you can buy khanka," he said.

Officials estimate there are as many as 200,000 addicts in Kyrgyzstan, once the furthestmost outpost of the Soviet empire, wedged between Uzbekistan and China. The number of addicts in Osh's treatment center - a mere fraction of the city total - has doubled in the last two years.

According to Alexander Zelichenko, coordinator of the United Nations Anti-Drug Project in Osh, two important developments occurred simultaneously: a Russian market for drugs opened up, and Iran, once on the drug smuggling route, launched a strict anti-drug campaign, virtually sealling its border with Afghanistan.

So, the drug traders headed north "Within six months, we here in Kyrgyzstan were already feeling the effect," Zelichenko said.

Osh's strategic location in the lush Fergana Valley makes it a logical transfer point for Afghan opium. It is here that the first wave of smugglers arrive after taking the "route beyond the clouds," a grueling trek to Kyrgyzstan across the Afghan border into Tajikistan and down the 12,000-foot-high passes of the Pamir Mountains - a place known as the "roof of the world."

For many of the 4 million people in the leafy, slow-moving villages around Osh, where nearly all the factories are closed the drug trade is the only viable business left.

The criminal trade has rapidly permeated the tradition-bound societies of Central Asia, where scarf-clad Muslim women still live in extended family compounds and do most of the farm labor. growing rapidly.