Pubdate: Wed, 26 Dec 2001
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution (GA)
Copyright: 2001 Cox Interactive Media.
Contact:  http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/28
Author: Craig Nelson, Cox News Service
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)

Afghanistan Turns Corner:

WITH TALIBAN GONE, POPPY CULTIVATION SURGES

GHOCHAK, Afghanistan -- There is widespread doubt here that anything 
resembling law and order will bloom in Afghanistan in the next six months. 
There is no doubt at all that opium poppies will bloom --- in abundance.

"Everyone is planting," says Ashoqullah, a 25-year-old landowner, who uses 
only one name. "In a few months, these fields will be covered in a blanket 
of spectacular red-and-white flowers. We'll draw the ooze from the flower 
bulbs, pack it in plastic bags or small soap cartons and sell it at the 
bazaar."

As Ashoqullah licks his lips over his future bounty, farmers bend over in 
fields behind him, slashing at white heads of cauliflower and yanking 
fragrant spring onions from the soil. They are scurrying to harvest food 
crops so they can sow poppy seeds in this village, five miles west of the 
eastern city of Jalalabad.

The war against terrorism has, for the moment at least, defeated the war on 
drugs in Afghanistan. The Taliban has been vanquished, and so has the ban 
on cultivating opium poppies.

The prohibition, which carried a three-month jail sentence, produced a 96 
percent drop in production of opium, from more than a million pounds in 
1999 to 40,600 pounds this year, said the U.N. Drug Control Program. With 
the demise of the puritanical Taliban, one of the world's poorest countries 
now is expected to regain its standing as the world's leading producer of 
opium and chief supplier of heroin to Europe.

Mirakbar, who also uses only one name, can barely suppress his glee at his 
anticipated windfall. The walled, mud-brick fortress in nearby Ghani Khel 
- --- known across the region as the Opium Bazaar --- is abuzz with activity 
as he and some 300 opium merchants ply their trade.

Operating in narrow smoky aisles and from wooden-door stalls equipped with 
little more than a scale and a tidy pile of plastic bags, Mirakbar and the 
other dealers buy the opium paste from farmers for roughly $90 a pound. In 
turn, he says, they sell it to brokers for $100. The raw opium is then 
shuttled by truck, mule or taxi into Pakistan, where it is processed into 
heroin worth billions of dollars to users around the world.

Says the 25-year-old Mirakbar: "The Taliban may have tried to prevent 
farmers from growing it, but they stockpiled it in warehouses and were 
involved in trading it. The new government will be, too."

Ashoqullah says many farmers have families of 15 members and cannot survive 
by raising vegetables.

The issue is strictly economic. They abhor the use of opium and other 
recreational drugs, though they have in their midst some of the most 
coveted opium and hashish in the world. They rarely drink alcohol or smoke 
cigarettes.

When asked if farmers in a country beset by chronic hunger, malnutrition 
and drought should reject the lure of poppies, Ashoqullah grows angry, 
pointing to a 90-by-300-foot plot of freshly-plowed land and the mound of 
the vegetables that had been cleared from it the previous day.

"If you want it, take it and put it in a truck and carry it away," he said 
of the vegetables. "We don't need any more, and the farmers here can't 
survive on it."
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MAP posted-by: Jackl