Narco Politics

The British alternative is what? More civilian deaths from air strikes?

British diplomat opposes legalized Afghan poppy crop

Britain’s top diplomat in Canada has dismissed a poll, commissioned by the international think-tank that is championing the legalization of Afghanistan’s contentious opium poppy crop, which shows that Canadians overwhelmingly support for the use of Afghan opium for medicinal purposes.

Cary was responding to the release of an Ipsos Reid survey of 1,000 Canadians, conducted on behalf of the Senlis Council, which found that nearly eight in 10 Canadians (79 per cent) want Prime Minister Stephen Harper to get behind an international pilot project that would help transform Afghanistan’s illicit opium cultivation into a legal source for codeine, morphine and other legitimate pain medications for the international market.

Oh so you could do it just that after six years you don't have the infrastructure.....right-o that's why Harper sent our troops into the Opium Fields. The effectiveness of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams can be measured in opium production.

Cary noted that while opium production has been licensed in such places as Thailand and Turkey, it took 15 years to achieve such a system. Afghanistan simply lacks the infrastructure and regulatory framework to cultivate opium legally and to keep it out of the hands of drug dealers, he said.

And for the British who created this problem in the 19th Century in order to expand their Empire to be telling us they oppose legalization, well that is a bit rich isn't it. They have a history of creating infrastructure and regulations for opium production.

It was not until the British Empire started organizing and commercializing opium production in the 19th century that the opium poppy became entrenched in the world economy. The opium produced in British India was the first drug to become integrated into the then emerging globalization.

Tea, which was then only grown in China, was bought by British merchants with silver extracted from South American mines.

This triangular trade went on at least until the British Empire, together with the East India Company it had set up, created a thriving opium market in China, first through illegal smuggling and then through forced imports.

The two so-called “opium wars” (1839-1842 and 1856-1860) waged by the British to impose their opium trade onto China resulted in “unfair treaties” that not only made Hong Kong a British colony but also provoked, in China, the biggest addiction ever to happen in world history.

Chickens, home, roost.

And after all this is a British problem, which they created back then and again today in Afghanistan.

Britain is stoned at home and sold out in Helmand

The vast increase in opium poppy farming in Afghanistan is indicative of an inability to grasp a basic law of economics

The British government for sure knows how to do one thing. It knows how to help farmers in need. Since it arrived in Afghanistan in 2001 and was put in charge of the staple poppy crop, ministers have spent hundreds of millions of pounds on promoting it. On Monday the United Nations announced the result. Poppy production in Afghanistan has soared since the invasion, this year alone by 34%. The harvest in the British-occupied protectorate of Helmand rose by 50% in 12 months. This is a dazzling triumph for agricultural intervention.

Ministers may deny this was their policy, but they cannot be that inept. They faced a heroin epidemic at home. Suddenly finding themselves charged with controlling almost all the world's opium production, they must have known what they were doing. By alienating farmers and forcing them into the arms of the Taliban, they would drive up illicit production and encourage oversupply. While that would increase heroin consumption in Britain in the short term, as it has done, oversupply would eventually cause prices to collapse. At that point, the British policy of "poppy substitution" with wheat and other crops would start to bite and supply would be stifled. What happened when that stifling drove prices back up again was someone else's concern.

I cannot think of any less daft explanation for a policy that otherwise defies every law of economics. Kim Howells, the Foreign Office minister responsible for flooding British streets with cheap heroin, may squabble with his American colleagues over whether poppy eradication is better than substitution, but one thing is certain. Since Nato arrived in Afghanistan, opium has become to the local economy what oil is to a Gulf state. It is roughly 60% of the domestic product and 90% of exports, with productivity per hectare rising by the year.

Those into conspiracy theories might be forgiven for thinking this might also be a policy of the CIA to destabilize Iran by increasing the number of heroin addicts in that country.

Despite US suspicions, Iran - which has one of the world's highest drug addiction rates - argues that it has legitimate interests in combating the influx of heroin and opiates from the poppy fields of Afghanistan. More than 3,000 Iranian police and security personnel have been killed in clashes with drug smugglers along the Afghan border since 1979.

Legalization would of course cure this problem by recognizing drug addiction as a medical problem, a curse of capitalism, rather than a crime.

The year 2009 will mark the centennial of the Shanghai Opium Conference, the first world-wide agreement on the reduction of opium use and production. China, then still an extremely poor feudal nation, was spending most of its foreign exchange on opium it imported through British traders. The British sold their cheap Indian Opium for pure silver to the Chinese, and had almost two centuries of opium fortune-making behind them. The fledgling United States of America tried to conquer a share of the profits in this lavish market, at a time when prohibitionist ideas about alcohol and opium control were expanding all over the globe. It was time for the American Disease to be born.

But don't expect support for that from Bush or Harper. They represent the traditional prohibitionist culture of social conservative Christians. The folks who oppose heroin legalization used to oppose the 'demon rum'.

In later analyses of the history of drug and alcohol controls other names for the American Disease have been coined. The most appropriate one, not tied to any nationality per se, is the 'Temperance Movement'. It was comprised of a collective of local movements prevalent in a group of nations. Later these nine nations would be identified as a special group, the nations where the temperance culture would endorse far reaching control policies in the attempt to regulate medical and recreational drugs. The global impact of these temperance cultures has varied from almost nothing to considerable.

Meanwhile it is telling that not only are Afhgani's the largest producers of opium they are also its victims.

Afghanistan is hooked on opium. The drugs trade has become the largest employer, its biggest export and the main source of income in a land devastated by decades of war. Opium is grown on 10 per cent of the farmland and employs 13 per cent of the population as labourers, guards and transport workers.

The ubiquity of the drug has now created the world's worst domestic drug problem, a crisis threatening to engulf any hope of economic revival. The first nationwide survey on drug use, by the Afghan Ministry of Counter-Narcotics and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, estimated that one million in this nation of 30 million were addicts, including 100,000 women and 60,000 children.

Defending the rights of Afghani women and children, the mantra of the Harpocrites used to justify their warmongering. And their war efforts have resulted in increased addictions amongst women and children. That surely is a measure of success of this mission.




SEE:

Two Canadians In Afghanistan

Say It Ain't So

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NATO, Helmand, drugs, heroin, opium, Iran, narcotics, addiction, opium war, Afghanistan, CIA, Narco Politics,

Opiate Of The Masses

Iran suffers from being the conduit for Afghanistan opium and heroin. It more than any other country is directly affected by the increased narcotic production in Afghanistan.

While the Canadian media hyped the latest UN Drug Report on the increased opium production in Afghanistan quoting the RCMP claim that we are getting more heroin from there than from the old Golden Triangle.

The Golden Triangle; Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, etc. was the result of the CIA's involvement with black ops there during the Viet Nam war as Afghanistan production is a result of CIA involvement during the anti-Soviet offensive. The fact remains that NATO and American operations against opium production in Afghanistan have been a failure because they have no real alternative to the value of this agricultural product a historic crop in the region. A product first used by British Imperialism to spread its power through out Asia in the 19th Century.

However, in Afghanistan as in other parts of the world, in Burma for example, opium has long been at stake in armed conflicts as its trade has allowed these conflicts to be prolonged. As the complex history of opium in Asia demonstrates, opium production and trade have been central to world politics and geopolitics for centuries and the role of the opium economy in Afghanistan does not represent a new trend. In many ways, history reinvents itself.

It was not until the British Empire started organizing and commercializing opium production in the 19th century that the opium poppy became entrenched in the world economy. The opium produced in British India was the first drug to become integrated into the then emerging globalization. Tea, which was then only grown in China, was bought by British merchants with silver extracted from South American mines. This triangular trade went on at least until the British Empire, together with the East India Company it had set up, created a thriving opium market in China, first through illegal smuggling and then through forced imports. The two so-called “opium wars” (1839-1842 and 1856-1860) waged by the British to impose their opium trade onto China resulted in “unfair treaties” that not only made Hong Kong a British colony but also provoked, in China, the biggest addiction ever to happen in world history. Eventually, opium consumption and addiction also spurred tremendous opium production in China. In response to the Chinese national consumption that drained its silver reserves, China became the world’s foremost opium producer.

This trend emerged first in Laos and in Burma, then in Afghanistan in what came to be known as the Golden Crescent. In both Southeast and Southwest Asia, the Central Intelligence Agency’s anti-Communist covert operations and secret wars benefited from the participation of some drug-related combat units or individual actors who, to finance their struggles, were directly involved in drug production and trade. To cite just two, the Hmong in Laos and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan.

Today, Afghanistan’s opium production is the direct outcome of Cold War rivalries and conflicts waged by proxies who helped develop a thriving narcotic economy in the country. Afghanistan has been the world’s leading opium-producing country for years now, with Burma and Laos ranking second and third respectively.

And NATO has not engaged the Iranians in controlling the border and transit points used by the opium producers in Afghanistan. And they will continue to fail until they engage the Iranians as allies in the fight against opium.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is a major transit route for opiates smuggled from Afghanistan and through Pakistan to the Persian Gulf, Turkey, Russia, and Europe. The largest single share of opiates leaving Afghanistan (perhaps 60 percent) passes through Iran to consumers in Iran itself, Russia and Europe. There is no evidence that narcotics transiting Iran reach the United States in an amount sufficient to have a significant effect. There are some indications that opium poppy cultivation is making a comeback in Iran, after a long period during which poppy cultivation was negligible. There are an estimated 3 million opiate abusers in Iran, with 60 percent reported as addicted to various opiates and 40 percent reported as casual users. With record levels of opium production right next door in Afghanistan, the latest opiate seizure statistics from Iran continue to suggest Iran is experiencing an epidemic of drug abuse, especially among its youth.

And contrary to the RCMP reports in the press, the United States government report above states that NO Afghani opium is getting into North America. Now do ya think the RCMP may be doing a bit of PR for their pal the PM to justify his war in Afghanistan?

NATO has relied upon American forces practicing large scale opium field eradication supported by air strikes which has led to large scale civilian deaths and friendly fire deaths to NATO forces.

Joanna Nathan
International Crisis Group analyst

Aerial eradication of poppies is not the solution. While some ground-based manual eradication is important as a stick, to discourage particularly new growers, it hits the poorest hardest. Aerial eradication can be too indiscriminate and would enrage a large sector of the population possibly driving them into the arms of the insurgents. On the other hand the proposal to license opium for medicinal use is unfeasible at this stage. Most of the drugs grown in Afghanistan are in Helmand which they haven't been able to stop when it is completely illegal. How would you then insert a massive licensing bureaucracy there and stop those who continue to grow for the black market? The price differentials would be so large there would be no incentive to grow for a licensed market.

The American war on opium production, like the rest of its Afghanistan mission, has been a failure, since it is America's allies in Helmand Province that turn out to be the opium producers themselves.

Eradication in Helmand

This season, the governor of Helmand asked the AEF to eradicate in Helmand. Despite making progress due to the AEF's heavy use of mechanized eradication, insecurity and waning political will hindered the AEF's efforts. Helmand will likely continue to be Afghanistan's largest opium cultivating province. Any future eradication strategy for Helmand needs to first account for security and political will.

It should be noted that 75% of the opium poppy cultivation in Helmand is new cultivation that did not exist two years ago. By definition, then, at least 75% of the poppy in Helmand is not being grown by poor farmers who lack licit economic alternatives-two years ago these farmers were doing something else.

In other words, the vast majority of the poppy in Helmand is not being grown by poor farmers who have been growing poppy for generations and lack economic alternatives. The reality is that cultivation has expanded rapidly in the past two years as opportunists have scrambled to exploit Helmand's lawlessness for profit. Many of Helmand's poppy growers are wealthy land-owners, corrupt officials, and other opportunists. Helmand's land is fertile; infrastructure and access to markets is good, and alternatives to poppy are available. Moreover, if Helmand were a country, it would be the fifth largest recipient of U.S. development aid in the world, having received over $270 million in USAID funds in recent years. Opium poppy grown by wealthy land-owners and corrupt officials funds the insurgency. There is no reason to avoid eradicating their poppy fields aggressively.

SEE:

Two Canadians In Afghanistan

Say It Ain't So

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