Reply #8: found a link on this..

[QuestionAll...]

With Taliban gone, poppy crops return

By Paul Salopek, Chicago Tribune,
26 December 2001

SORUKH ROAD, Afghanistan -- The muddy waters of the Red River are eked out carefully in the fields of Sorukh Road, a parched farming village largely depopulated by two punishing years of drought.

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“It is good to be growing poppies again,” said Muhammad Tauib, a barefoot farmer who is replanting his fields with the narcotic plant once banned by Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime. “At least my family will be able to eat.”

In fact, Tauib's family never stopped relying on the illicit crop, even when the Taliban outlawed all drug cultivation in Afghanistan last year. To survive the drought, he and other villagers simply fell back on sales from their large hoards of opium gum, the source of heroin.

With the recent defeat of the Taliban regime by the United States and its Afghan allies, the harsh anti-drug laws imposed by the old Islamic government have fallen by the wayside. According to United Nations drug-control analysts, poppy plantations that had been abolished on religious grounds are under renewed cultivation.

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/124.html