Reply #9: Globalresearch has the UN figures

[DrDebug]

It's all estimates and guesstimates, however The Spoils of War http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO404A.html has the following UN figures which is probably most reliable source (2004):

Total market: $400-500 billion
Afghanistan: $50 billion
Afghanistan trafficking: $1.3 billion

Which means that if al-Qaeda, Afghanistan exist to hide its real function as a cartel, it will have direct income of about a billion each year.

And that's just one part, because there are plenty of other advantage as well, the main being the enormous destabilizing effect of Poppy. Iran had to admit that it had over a million heroin addicts as a result of the attempt to get a slice of the market. The relative effects in Afghanistan are many times bigger. Not to mention the consumer market.

Maybe Ruppert should his butt of peak oil because we've found some coke next to the 9/11 planes and he is a former South Central investigator ( http://www.archive.org/details/ctc )