Posted on 11/20/2004 10:12:36 AM PST by LesbianThespianGymnasticMidget
KABUL, Afghanistan - President Hamid Karzai said fighting the booming opium trade is a top priority, following a UN report warning that Afghanistan risks becoming a “ nacro-state.” But he rejected a US proposal to spray poppies with herbicides, citing health risks.
A UN survey released this week showed Afghanistan this year supplied 87 percent of the world’s opium - the raw material for heroin - following record-high cultivation that has skyrocketed since the fall of the Taleban in 2001.
The heroin industry undermines Afghanistan’s democracy and puts money into the coffers of terrorists, the UN report said, adding that the “ fear that Afghanistan might degenerate into a narco-state is slowly becoming a reality.”
Afghan and Western counter-narcotics officials have said that US experts are looking at using crop dusters to spray opium poppies with herbicides - a key weapon in the disputed US -backed war against coca farmers in South America.
But Karzai said he opposed aerial spraying because of concerns over side effects among residents in farming communities close to the fields.
“ While emphasizing its strong commitment to the eradication of poppy fields, the government of Afghanistan opposes the aerial spraying of poppy fields as an instrument of eradication,” Karzai’s office said in a statement following Thursday’s UN report.
The U.S.-backed leader expressed alarm at reports from the key poppy-growing province of Nangarhar, close to the Pakistani border, that planes had already sprayed fields planted with poppy.
“ The president is deeply concerned about complaints from the region pointing to possible side effects of the aerial spraying on the health of children and adults,” the statement said.
Officials will travel to the area to investigate, it said.
The United States and Britain are training small paramilitary units to smash laboratories and arrest drug suspects. Nangarhar has been earmarked for vigorous crop eradication.
But it is unclear whether officials already have begun experimenting with herbicides, which critics say can wipe out legal crops planted nearby as well as harming villagers and livestock.
Officials in Kabul could not be reached immediately for comment, but Mohammed Daoud, the Afghan deputy interior minister for counter-narcotics, told AP recently that the planes “ could be useful, and would frighten people” - but said they should only be used as a last resort.
One Western official involved in Afghan drug policy said in an interview last month that spraying was “ not going to be imposed on anybody” without Afghan government support.
In recent years, Afghanistan has used squads of laborers to thrash down poppy crops, but that has had little impact on drug output.
The annual survey released Thursday by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime found poppy cultivation rose 64 percent to a record 131,000 hectares (323,700 acres) in 2004, producing an estimated 4,200 tons of opium. It valued the trade at US$2.8 billion (euro2.15 billion), or more than 60 percent of Afghanistan’s 2003 gross domestic product.
On Wednesday, US drug enforcement agencies asked Congress for an additional US$780 million (euro599 million) to fund both the crackdown and provide alternative crops or livelihoods for farmers.
Pressure is also mounting to snatch big smugglers - believed to include a string of government officials - and officials say judges have already been recruited for a special court to try suspected drug kingpins.
Mirwais Yasini, the head of Afghanistan’s Counter-narcotics Directorate, said Thursday that this year’s surge in production only added to the urgency.
“ It is undermining our national security, it is undermining our good name in the international community,” he said. “ We cannot live with this dragon any more.”
Simply eradicating the plants is not a solution.
I question whether any plan to eradicate cultivation will work. The incentive to grow a cash crop that far exceeds any other in terms of profit margin is almost impossible to overcome.
As long as there is high demand for the product, the supply will come from somewhere.
Take the profit out of it and they won't grow it. You can't win the drug war by making drugs illegal. Prohibition, like socialism, just doesn't work. Time to put our thinking caps on. Denial is not a river in Egypt.
Agreed. People in the US (and particularly trendy Hollywood and rock stars who feel obligated to use heroin) need to understand that there is a supply side and a demand side. I have seen a few, but clearly not enough of the PSA's that shove the link between drug use and funding of terrorism right in the face of the casual drug user. The same people who agitate n the side of relaxing drug penalties in the US are the ones insinuating that our government has something to do with narcoterrorism elsewhere - when more than any thing else it is their discretionary choice to buy these drugs that is causing enormous dislocations elsewhere in the world.
The addicts and recreational users in this country and the west are the guilty parties. Lay off the poor farmers and quit subjecting them to these poisons.
Only partially true. The people who grow opium crops are incredibly poor. They make very little from selling their crops on the market. They are not the ones profiting.
As I said before, the main reason they grow these crops is because in most cases, the land can not support any other types of crops. They are forced to grow it or die. Our only chance to stop the production is to help them with alternatives, such as non-narcotic plants.
The people growing it in Afghanistan, Burma, Laos, and other places are not making a profit. They barely make enough to stay alive.
Better the cash flow through Afghanistan (whose government is in our back pocket) than someplace like Burma or Laos.
It's so obvious that the approach we've been taking for the last 40 years hasn't done anything to curb the drug problem. It's built huge and powerful empires for those in power, but it's also robbed the taxpayer of billions. The war on drugs is like the war on poverty, the more money you put into it, the bigger the problem gets.
It's true they are not making the big bucks, that comes from refinement and distribution. But they are making enough to give them incentive to grow it. It's a subsitence level profit, but a profit non the less.
Of course, my comment was directed more towards those saying we need to take the profit out of it. It is hard to take the profit out of something when there is almost no alternative and little profit to begin with.
The Wa farmers in Burma are forbidden to refine opium in any way. If they did, they would get a lot more for it on the markets in Yunnan. Obviously, this rule is there for a reason. To keep the profits in the hands of others. Our battle is not with the growers but unfortunately, the US government can't see this and still views them as the problem.
That's the drug problem distilled to half a sentence. The market will supply demand, somehow, someway. The only way to block supply is to make it very, very expensive, in legal consequenses to the suppliers.
But that's impossible with our commitment to civil liberties and the restraint we put on law enforcement in the pursuit of those liberties. I recently watched an HBO series called 'The Wire'. One of the sub themes that became evident was the difficulty in convicting people that are involved in the drug trade. It's darn near impossible, and as soon as they get one person, two more take his place.
You can't stop the suppliers, you can't stop the cultivators, so the last decade or so has seen an effort to come down hard on the users. Now we have a prison system that is overloaded with people that serve serious time for simple possession. What effect has that had?
None. I'm starting to think there is no solution.
Spray the fields with mines. Heroin is also hazardous to health.
Maybe there is........shhhhhhhhhhhh.......whisper.......legalization?
Farmers don't produce heroin.
I guess I'm willing to entertain the idea as an alternative, but it wouldn't be a solution. You trade one set of problems for another. Which set of problems would be worse? Or do we already have all those problems along with the problems of prohibition?
I don't see it happening though. Two very powerfull political groups oppose it. One is the people that oppose it on moral grounds. The other is the drug dealers and the politicians they pay off.
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