The Reality-Based Community

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

  • Home
  • About
  • BOTEC Analysis
You are here: Home / Drug Policy / Buy the Afghan poppy crop? I don’t think so.

Buy the Afghan poppy crop? I don’t think so.

September 29, 2006 By Mark Kleiman @markarkleiman

Mike O’Hare (see below) may be right about buying the Afghan opium crop, but I doubt it. It’s been tried before in various places, with uniform lack of success. (Yes, we eventually dried up the Turkish illicit opium crop, but without lasting benefit in terms of reducing the world’s heroin supply.)

Opium-growing land isn’t scarce. If we buy out one group of peasants, another group will enter the trade. (Or the people we buy from will plant two crops, one for us and one for the traffickers.)

Anyway, if Afghanistan doesn’t grow poppy, someplace else will. The price of opium is a trivial fraction of the price of heroin on the street. As long as there are refiners, exporters, dealers and (most of all) users of heroin, there will always be enough opium to supply them.

If Afghanistan were an independent country with a smart government, it would figure out that:

(1) Afghanistan doesn’t have a heroin consumption problem.

(2) Afghanistan does have an insurgency-and-crime problem, fueled in part by opium-dealing money.

(3) Exporting heroin creates problems for Afghanistan only because it’s illegal.

(4) If European governments want to protect Europeans, who now buy most of the heroin made from Afghani poppies, from their bad habits, they need to fix their domestic drug policies. Because methadone, LAAM, and buprenorphine are highly effective treatments for heroin addiction, expanding treatment capacity can make a big difference. (That’s much less true for the stimulants, for which there is no effective substitution therapy.)

(5) Therefore Afghanistan should repeal its laws against opium-growing and heroin manufacturing and exporting.

However, for these purposes Afghanistan isn’t independent, and the U.S. and European governments that prop up the Karzai regime are far too caught up in drug-war ideology to allow their client so much slack, even though our stakes in defeating the Taliban are hugely greater than our stakes in reducing Afghani poppy production.

So Karzai, with our support, ought to go for a second-best solution. Together we should identify opium-growing and heroin-trafficking regions and organizations tied to the Taliban, and go after them, leaving the other drug dealers (including the leadership of the Northern Alliance) untouched. The goal would be to create such competitive disadvantage for the Taliban-linked dealers as to make them uncompetitive in the market.

Such a policy could never be openly embraced; again, the political investment in the drug war is too great. But it could be pursued as an open secret, with appropriate tough-on-drugs rhetoric plus some references to the importance of concentrating rather than dispersing enforcement attention.

That’s not a wonderful result: it continues to strengthen the Northern Alliance as against Karzai, where legalization could fund the central government and de-fund the warlords. But it’s clearly the least bad politically feasible response to the current situation.

Filed Under: Drug Policy

Comments

  1. serial catowner says

    September 30, 2006 at 1:06 am

    So, becuse the elites have invested so much in propaganda, a policy supporting gangsters should be adopted as an "open secret, with appropriate tough-on-drugs rhetoric".
    I dunno, sounds pretty distant from the concept of an informed electorate making the best decision they can.

  2. bemused says

    September 30, 2006 at 1:15 am

    You should read Sarah Chayes' new book "The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban". (See the review in the wapo here.

  3. bemused says

    September 30, 2006 at 1:16 am

    Since you filter urls I put it in the url field of this post, as well as plain text here:
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti…

Blogroll

  • Balloon Juice
  • The Belgravia Dispatch
  • Brad DeLong
  • Cop in the ‘hood
  • Crooked Timber
  • Crooks and Liars
  • Echidne of the Snakes
  • Firedoglake
  • A Fistful of Euros
  • Healthinsurance.org Blog
  • Horizons
  • How Appealing
  • The Incidental Economist
  • Informed Comment — Juan Cole
  • Jonathan Bernstein
  • Kevin Drum
  • Marginal Revolution — Tyler Cowen
  • Marijuana Monitor
  • The Moderate Voice
  • Obsidian Wings
  • Patheos
  • Philosoraptor
  • Plato o Plomo — Alejandro Hope
  • Political Animal
  • Politics Upside Down
  • Progressive Blog Digest
  • Progressive Blue
  • Slacktivist
  • Snopes
  • Strange Doctrines
  • Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • The Volokh Conspiracy (Washington Post)
  • Vox Pop

Recent Posts

  • Percentages and the pastrami panic…
  • Do professors care whether college students are actually learning?
  • Cannabis News Round-Up
  • Emergency
  • Weekend Film Recommendation: Hangover Square

Archives

Topic Areas

Copyright © 2017 The Reality-Based Community  •  Designed & Developed by ReadyMadeWeb LLC