Pubdate: Fri, 12 Oct 2001
Source: Denver Rocky Mountain News (CO)
Copyright: 2001 Denver Publishing Co.
Contact:  http://www.denver-rmn.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/371
Author: Lance Gay
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)

A TALIBAN WEAPON: HEROIN

U.S officials are worried that Afghanistan's ruling Taliban regime will 
unleash a vast stockpile of opium on the world market in the wake of the 
U.S.-led attacks.

American intelligence agencies estimate the Taliban has stockpiled more 
than 800 tons of opium over the last five years. Afghanistan emerged as the 
world's largest producer of the illicit drug in 1999, replacing Burma's 
"Golden Triangle" region.

The Drug Enforcement Administration says 5 percent of opium consumed by 
heroin addicts in the United States comes from Afghanistan. Most heroin now 
sold on American streets comes from "black tar" opium grown in Mexico and 
Colombia.

Although the Taliban last year launched a high-profile public-relations 
campaign vowing to wipe out the poppy fields, the State Department has 
repeatedly accused the fundamentalist regime of stockpiling opium rather 
than destroying it in order to boost world prices.

William Bach, director of the Asian office of the State Department's Bureau 
of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, said the Taliban 
has "condoned and profited from the drug trade," imposing a 10 percent tax 
on producers and traffickers to raise money to buy arms.

Bach said there is evidence the Taliban also has developed laboratories to 
turn opium into the more lucrative heroin to maximize profits. A 1999 
United Nations report indicated the drug trade produced $40 million for 
Taliban militants that year.

A U.N. report earlier this year said that while the Taliban's supreme 
spiritual leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, announced a ban on poppy production 
in July 1999, that directive was applied only to regions outside of direct 
Taliban control, so the Taliban was free to keep producing the drug itself.

Some reports from the region say that even that directive was lifted Sept. 
2 - nine days before the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and 
Pentagon - when the Taliban-owned Voice of Shariat announced the ban on 
poppy production was rescinded.

Asa Hutchinson, administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, told 
the House Government Reform Committee last week that his agency has no 
direct evidence that Osama bin Laden is directly involved in the drug 
trade. But Hutchinson said there's no doubt the drug trade is financing the 
Taliban. "This connection defines the deadly symbiotic relationship between 
the illegal drug trade and international terrorism," he said.

Following last year's announced Taliban crackdown on opium production, the 
price of opium increased from $44 a kilogram (2.2 pounds) to $400. But 
after the U.S.-led attacks, the price declined to $95 a kilogram as 
Hutchinson said opium wholesalers began dumping their supplies.
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