Loading ...Taliban’s Massively Successful Opium Eradication Raises Questions About What US Was Doing All Along
“Armed with little more than sticks, teams of counter-narcotics brigades travel the country, cutting down Afghanistan’s poppy fields…”
The Taliban government in Afghanistan – the nation that until recently produced 90% of the world’s heroin – has drastically reduced opium cultivation across the country. Western sources estimate an up to 99% reduction in some provinces. This raises serious questions about the seriousness of U.S. drug eradication efforts in the country over the past 20 years. And, as global heroin supplies dry up, experts tell MintPress News that they fear this could spark the growing use of fentanyl – a drug dozens of times stronger than heroin that already kills more than 100,000 Americans yearly.
In April of last year, the ruling Taliban government announced the prohibition of poppy farming, citing both their strong religious beliefs and the extremely harmful social costs that heroin and other opioids – derived from the sap of the poppy plant – have wrought across Afghanistan.
It’s an untold story. The notorious Taliban are drug runners, despite being religiously against drugs, and poor westerners are in thrall to drugs despite valiant measures to eradicate them! What nonsense! We are the market and we are the supplier. What we aren’t is honest, and so our people suffer. It’s all ending, along with the other perversions of the western ‘rules based order”.
Thanks, K2! It’s harder to close our eyes to the devastation that drug use confers on the users. We con ourselves into thinking there are economic, social work solutions to addiction. There aren’t! Suppliers need to be hanged in the public square! Addicts will do without, and get better.
Should I add that there are hundreds of girls and boys in every city selling their bodies so that hey can buy fentanyl. Their life expectancy is counted in months. Their lives are joyless. Hang ’em high, Judge! Give us back our children.
So this story is about illicit drug production which in this case is the heroin poppy. Its manufacture and production is in the hands of mostly small scale farmers who are in effect pharmacies as they supply potent and heavily in demand drugs. The obvious question I have is what involvement does big pharma have in the eradication of the opium business in Afghanistan. This story tells us it is the Taliban who are ending the trade because of their value systems but I suspect more is in play. Obviously the business of opiodes is lucrative and as the story relates there will be a huge demand for alternatives and man-made drugs as the natural product goes into shortage. Whose bottom lines is bolstered by that event? When so much money is on the line we had better believe that the hands of the big corporate interest are involved in some way. This crash in poppy production is not likely just Taliban edicts to farmers to stop growing. Indeed, the entire pullout from Afghanistan may have its roots in the economic interests of pharma companies who are effectively in competition with the small farmers of Afghanistan. Could this be the real reason the US walked away from the country and poppy production is now falling off a cliff?
The other angle involves the CIA, which reputedly uses drug running to fund covert operations. That goes back to Iran-Contra, Mena Arkansas, and the Clinton connection. At least. So by losing this war, the CIA also lost a funding source.
Where next?
Good discussion guys