Is NATO to Blame for Russia's Afghan Heroin Problem?

[unhappycamper]

Is NATO to Blame for Russia's Afghan Heroin Problem?
By Simon Shuster / Moscow Saturday, Jun. 12, 2010


It had to be one of the weirdest displays the Russian president had ever seen. Laid out on a table were a mound of walnuts, a chess set, an old tire and an anatomically correct dummy — all stuffed with little baggies of imitation heroin. Titled "The Deadly Harvest," the exhibit was meant to show the clever ways smugglers have of getting Afghan heroin into Russia, which has become the world's largest consumer of opiates from Afghanistan since the U.S. began its war there in 2001. President Dmitry Medvedev stared at the objects and shook his head grimly. Behind him, wearing equally somber expressions, stood a group of Russian officials who would spend the day, June 9, lambasting the U.S. and NATO for not doing more to stop these little baggies from getting into the hands of Russia's youth.

On the international stage, Russia's Afghan heroin issue has become the country's favorite crusade, and has allowed Russia to enter a global debate about Afghanistan that had previously left it on the sidelines. Its basic point is a reasonable one: NATO has fueled drug production by refusing to destroy Afghan poppy fields, which it stopped doing last year in the hope of winning the support of opium farmers. Perhaps less reasonable is Russia's belief that its heroin problem is caused not by its porous borders or its abysmal treatment of addiction (methadone therapy is illegal in Russia) but by NATO's policy on drugs in Afghanistan. Yet that is what Russian officials contend, and this week they embarked on a campaign of coordinated fuming over the issue.

On June 7, Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov was in Singapore for an annual defense conference, and he used his turn at the lectern to berate NATO's tolerance of poppy crops. At a Central Asian security summit in Berlin the following day, the chief of Russia's anti-narcotics agency, Viktor Ivanov, compared NATO to Dr. Frankenstein, suggesting that its Afghan drug policy was "giving birth to a monster." Then on Wednesday and Thursday, the Kremlin's information agency, RIA Novosti, held a conference on the heroin issue in Moscow. The exhibit of smugglers' tricks was its main attraction, and at the podium, some of the Russian speakers threatened to punish the coalition if it didn't change its approach to Afghan poppies. "Further assistance to the coalition must be predicated upon a more active position in the fight against drug production in Afghanistan," Russia's envoy to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, told the delegates, suggesting that NATO's vital supply route through Russia could be cut if the destruction of poppy fields didn't resume.

In its way, Russia is making an important point. Between 2005 and 2009, Afghanistan's yearly opium output jumped from 4,000 to 7,000 tons, and it now accounts for more than 90% of global supply, according to the United Nations. Russian state statistics say that opiates such as heroin and morphine kill around 30,000 Russians every year, three times more than the total number of Soviets killed during their 10-year war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. And the U.N. also says that the $65 billion earned every year from the sale of opiates partly goes to finance terrorists around the world, including the Taliban militants that the U.S. is fighting in Afghanistan.

But Russia is wrong to claim that NATO is ignoring the problem. NATO's March offensive in Marjah redoubled the crackdown on drug traffickers with the aim of cutting the Taliban off from its main source of funding, and U.N. data shows that Afghan opium production has fallen by about 15% since its peak in 2007. Russia insists that is not nearly enough, and has consistently offered the help of its own military alliance, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), in stemming the flow of drugs through Central Asia and the Caucasus.



unhappycamper comment: This camper bets the Poppy Program is being run by the CIA to have some extra 'black' money for _________ (fill in the blank).

[glowing]

1. Without the drugs, the CIA could be controlled by the President.

AND its not exactly like these leaders really care if their citizens are stoned or dead... They care when it becomes a big enough social epidemic that it threatens their viability.. and they use it as a way to install a Police-state. If people around the world had meaningful, happy lives, most wouldn't turn to drugs that can cause so much damage. If marijuana was legalized and opium just smoked and coke leaves just chewed in their more natural states, then usage would probably be limited and used more for medical necessity or a bit of fun recreation, rather than rampant despair.