Everyone - chill out and consider this.
Once upon a time, back in ‘03 and ‘04, the consensus among some US, UK and Allied military planners in Afghanistan was to convert their poppy growing into medicinal supply for the third world. People in the back country areas of the globe require pain killers, just like in the ‘modern’ countries.
The idea was that the farmers would be paid for growing the same stuff they grow anyway, but instead of selling it to the drug lords of central Asia, they would sell it to the factory down the road. Where the opiates would be turned into medicinal drugs for sale.
The idea was quashed from powers on high. I suspect that two BIG pharmaceutical companies, one from Europe and one from North America, decided that the introduction of cheap opiate medicines on the world market was something they didn’t want.
They make huge profits off synthetic versions and they don’t want competitors.
Our government, and others, swept in and we had DEA agents in combat, with air support, doing half-assed eradication efforts.
The idea to use traditional opium growing regions to provide medical-quality medicines at a lower rate is anathema to the companies that make lots of money making and selling their own.
That’s why we’ll never see cheaper drugs, and this mayor will either be bought or killed for coming up with the idea. Plata o Plomo.
Chill out? I was making a joke.
But if you want me to be serious;
They probably killed that idea because no matter how many fields of poppies are grown for legitimate medicine the black market for heroin will still exist and will be supplied by black market poppy fields. It’s probably also cheaper to synthesize opioids and that’s why they don’t use poppy derived opioids.