Estimates of soaring opium production in Afghanistan are being used by the anti-narcotics establishment - Western and international law enforcement agencies - to advocate a deepening of an eradication drive that is already a proven failure in its own terms and is also a political disaster in the campaign to pull the country from the embrace of Islamist extremism.
The approach is already at odds with the “hearts and minds” campaign by Western and Afghan government military forces in the Pashtun-populated south of the country, which harbours the resurgent Taliban. The alienation being caused by sporadic raids to cut down opium crops - mostly in the fields of those farmers unable to buy protection from corrupt government officials - may already have contributed to the willingness of local villages to harbour Taliban fighters. A callous and chaotic opium-cutting expedition by private American contractors in Uruzgan province last year coincided with the ambush of an Australian Army patrol.
A graphic account of this raid in the last northern spring by the New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson depicts the 40-odd contractors from Washington-based DynCorp - mostly ex-soldiers from the American South and Midwest of the “good ol’ boy” type - heading a convoy into Uruzgan villages. The inhabitants watch with rage as their annual earnings disappear, while the provincial governor steers the raid away from the fields under his protection.
Yet the response from Washington has been to apply more pressure on President Mohammed Karzai to authorise aerial spraying of opium fields in the growing season coming up, or failing that, spraying from ground vehicles, instead of the present method of manual cutting of opium plants or dragging of chains between vehicles.
The recently appointed US Ambassador in Kabul, William Wood, is a strong supporter of the aerial use of glyphosate spray. He spent the previously four years as ambassador in Columbia where an American-funded counter-narcotics campaign relies on aerial spraying of coca, the plant from which cocaine is derived. The ever growing flow of cocaine into world markets, and the extension of Columbian cartels into bases in West Africa, suggest we should be cautious about this approach.
Mr Wood reportedly offered to be doused in glyphosate himself to demonstrate its harmlessness. Yet use of a chemical spray, which could be blamed for all kinds of symptoms and would affect food crops often grown alongside opium, would hand the Taliban a mighty propaganda tool. And that’s not counting the impact on the livelihoods of the 14 percent of the Afghan population said by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime to be involved directly in opium cultivation.
Opium exports after all are said by US State Department to be worth some US$4 billion, with some estimates saying US$1 billion getting to farmers. The export figure is put at half Afghanistan’s GDP. As the saying goes, what do they intend to replace it with? The alternative cash crops and farm support, promised by Karzai and his foreign backers to balance opium eradication, remain undelivered.
Anderson’s article makes it plain that America’s European allies, including the Dutch who have 1600 soldiers in Uruzgan working closely with Australia’s reconstruction group and special forces, have serious misgivings about the eradication approach and would like it called off. What should then be the alternative for the NATO countries (and those working with them, like Australia) to discuss at the summit on Afghanistan in Rumania next month?
The first step would be to set aside the repugnance that inhibits rational thinking about opiate drugs and makes officials, particularly those working for the US government, unwilling to even debate policy alternatives that might include tolerance of drug taking or acceptance that some drug abuse will always be with us. Opium, after all, is not only grown by bearded Afghan or Wa peasants, sold to Taliban dealers or Chinese triads, refined into heroin in illegal factories in Pakistan or Burma, and smuggled into rich-country markets in the stomachs of Nigerians, strapped around gullible “mules” or hidden in containers of Chinese household products.
In Tasmania, about 1500 normal farmers in woolly jumpers grow opium, as do counterparts in Britain, Hungary and Norway. Last year Britain authorised the planting of 3000 hectares of opium, compared with 422 hectares in 2002. The poppy goes to pharmaceutical companies to make pain-killers like codeine, for headaches, or the powerful diamorphine used mostly by patients in the final stages of cancer. Macfarlan Smith, the Edinburgh-based pharmaceutical division of the listed giant Johnson Matthey, even gives some opium-growing tips on its website: “If you are interested in growing poppies you must have free-draining soil, have a pH [a measure of acidity] over seven and have on-floor drying system,” it advises.
The United States itself thought outside the eradication square in the 1970s when it worked with Turkey, previously the “Golden Horn” of heroin supply and source of the “French connection” supply route, to guarantee a market for licensed opium cultivation. Along with India, which also has licensed opium cultivation as a legacy of the East India Company trade with China, Turkey has an 80 per cent share of the US market for legal opiates. Tasmania and other suppliers have the other 20 per cent.
The Senlis Council, a European non-government organisation with field offices in several parts of Afghanistan, is proposing a “poppy-for-medicine” scheme in which licensed growers supply a central operation making codeine, morphine and other painkillers for export to other developing countries. This would allow Afghanistan to capture some of what they say is a 4000 per cent mark-up between growing costs and the consumer price of opiate-based drugs in the West.
The economics of this scheme would seem to be worth studying. After all, the United States and Britain are spending some US$1.2 billion a year on the present ineffective drug eradication operation. At the reported US$86 a kilo being paid to growers for opium resin last year, the cost of buying the entire 8200 tonne crop would be $US705.2 million, or 59 per cent of the US-British eradication budget.
The US State Department’s Inspector-General argues there is “no realistic possibility of outspending economic incentives in the narcotics industry” given the estimated $US38 billion street value of Afghanistan’s poppy crop if it were all converted to heroin. Given the rising multibillion cost of waging the Afghan war, it would be worth a try. Drug barons would be squeezed by the high profit margins they need to keep, to pay off corrupt officials and reward couriers and dealers, and the generally low earning power of their ultimate client base. The pool of heroin users in rich countries like Australia has been stable for many years. The growth area for illegal heroin is in poor countries like Pakistan, or middle-income countries like Russia and Iran.
Would there be a market for diamorphine and other painkillers produced by a Senlis-model industry? The British drive to increase poppy acreage suggests a strong market in developed countries. In addition there is an unfulfilled demand in less-developed and emerging countries where the majority of terminal-stage cancer patients probably spend their last days without the help of strong palliative medicines.
If they can get this far in their thinking, the Afghan partners might also consider legalising heroin for pharmacy-prescription to addicts, part of a longstanding British approach and parallelled by the prescription of methadone, a powerful synthetic alternative, in other countries included Australia.
Heroin is not the most dangerous drug around. Thought it can be fatal in overdose - and when illegal is associated with crime and prostitution - it is not toxic to human cells like alcohol and nicotine nor does it cause psychosis like cocaine and amphetamines. In the first part of the twentieth century, before being made illegal, heroin and morphine users in Britain (and some other countries) tended to be doctors and other professionals, or upper-class literary socialites of the Diana Mitford type.
Neutralising the illegal opiate industry both from the supply end and the demand end would be a far better way of winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan than the eradication path on which the coalition is embarked. If other countries like Iran, Pakistan and Russia decided to remain hooked on illegal heroin, they can thank the Taliban.
