Reply #9: On the Poppy Trail

[happy_liberal]

From 2000 to 2001, under international pressure, the Taliban stopped poppy growing. But the trade sprang back within weeks after the U.S. invasion in October 2001.

It was simple free market economics. The West had a demand for heroin. Afghanistan had hardworking farmers and entrepreneurial drug traffickers who could match supply with demand. Once the U.S. invaded, there were no more of those pesky government regulations to bother the narco-capitalists.

The U.S.-allied Northern Alliance, the mujahedeen who had continued to fight the Taliban in the 1990s, supported themselves through heroin production and distribution. After the U.S. invasion, they simply moved their headquarters to Kabul as part of the newly installed Hamid Karzai government. Poppy was back in bloom, and Afghanistan quickly became the world’s number one heroin supplier.

Those were boom times for the Ebad family. Starting in 2004, they grew poppy. Raw opium was fetching $220/kilo. “It made economic sense,” Ebad says. “With that money, we solved all of our problems.”

Local drug traffickers loaned him money to plant the crop. The traffickers shipped the opium to primitive labs where it was turned into heroin for eventual shipment to nearby Pakistan. Each step of the process was protected by local police and political officials. They, in turn, were protected by networks of traffickers reaching all the way to the Karzai cabinet. The mainstream media largely ignored the role of government officials, however, instead spreading the myth that the Taliban controlled most of the drug trade.

http://www.progressive.org/erlich1109.html