No More Opium, No More Money for Afghan Villagers

Source: ABC News

For as long as anyone can remember, there was no need for paper money in this remote corner of the Hindu Kush. The common currency was what grew in everyone's backyard — opium.

When children felt like buying candy, they ran into their father's fields and returned with a few grams of opium folded inside a leaf. Their mothers collected it in plastic bags, trading 18 grams for a meter of fabric or two liters of cooking oil. Even a visit to the barbershop could be settled in opium.

But the economy of this village sputtered to a halt last year when the government began aggressively enforcing a ban on opium production. Villagers were not allowed to plant their only cash crop. Now shops are empty and farmers are in debt, as entire communities spiral into poverty.

Opium is one of the biggest problems facing this troubled country, because it is deeply woven into the fabric of daily life as well as into the economics of insurgency. Afghanistan supplies 93 percent of the world's opium, and it is one of the main sources of funding for the growing Taliban movement.



Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=8236634

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snip

Two years ago, opium, the raw ingredient used to make heroin, grew on nearly half a million acres in Afghanistan. The harvest was worth about $4 billion, or equal to nearly half the country's GDP in 2007. As much as a tenth — almost half a billion dollars — went to local strongmen, including the Taliban, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

the CIA's black ops all around the world

How do I know you may ask. Because I seen cocaine appear on our street corners shortly after ronnie raygun took the reigns. During the previous administration cocaine was hard to find but shortly after the election of '80 it was everywhere.

my time in the Navy/Marine Corps was at the end of VietNam... most of our time was spent helping those drug growers get out and get re-located

funny how many ended up in Miami, Juarez, Browsnville, Bogota or Rio

I think both headlines sort of miss the point.

It's been the custom for a long long time, and it's been well known too.

JALALABAD, Afghanistan (February 15, 2001 8:19 p.m. EST

U.N. drug control officers said the Taliban religious militia has nearly wiped out opium production in Afghanistan -- once the world's largest producer -- since banning poppy cultivation last summer.

A 12-member team from the U.N. Drug Control Program spent two weeks searching most of the nation's largest opium-producing areas and found so few poppies that they do not expect any opium to come out of Afghanistan this year.

"We are not just guessing. We have seen the proof in the fields," said Bernard Frahi, regional director for the U.N. program in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He laid out photographs of vast tracts of land cultivated with wheat alongside pictures of the same fields taken a year earlier -- a sea of blood-red poppies.

http://opioids.com/afghanistan/index.html

Ambassador Holbrooke and UNODC Costa have declared that eradication is a failure. Do you disagree?

The real question should be when are we going to stop spraying poison on hundreds of thousands of acres in Colombia? It doesn't work there, either. Colombia remains the world's largest cocaine produce even after a decade of spraying.

"insane"?!1

Opium and marijuana are both less dangerous (the latter by a greater margin than the former) than much of the crap we put into our bodies on a day to day basis, including tobacco/nicotine, alcohol, and a lot of prescription drugs (stuff like lorazepam and percocet are both more dangerous than opium...lorazepam and clonazepam can sure feel nice though).

"For Freedom!!!!" :puke: