Pubdate: Thu, 28 Sep 2006
Source: Amherst Daily News (CN NS)
Section: Pg 4
Copyright: Amherst Daily News 2006
Contact:  http://www.amherstdaily.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3379
Author: George Jonas
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)

POPPIES SEEM TO MAKE PEOPLE STUPID

Noting the remarkable staying power of the Taliban, observers have 
been speculating about the reason. On the face of it, the harsh rule 
of Afghanistan's former masters is unlikely to elicit nostalgia. Even 
allowing for the peculiarities of the region - backwardness, 
tribalism, and so on - what could these fanatic martinets of Islamist 
militancy offer to Afghan villagers to merit as much popular support 
as they seem to enjoy?

How much support, exactly? Not overwhelming, but enough to keep 
Mullah Omar's followers in the game, and cost some Canadian lives. 
Support in adversity, one might add, when support is notoriously hard 
to come by. Being supported when flush with success is one thing, but 
the Taliban has been on the run for the last five years. Cruel, 
oppressive, unattractive, defeated - Afghans shouldn't give such 
sullen mullahs the time of the day. Indeed, many don't, but amazingly 
some do, which raises the question, why?

The answer may be poppies.

More accurately, poppies figure prominently among the answers: far 
more prominently than we have been willing to acknowledge. Opium 
poppies (Papaver somniferum) are, of course, a source of opiates. 
They are also a source of income of some Afghan farmers - even entire 
villages. Often, the main, sometimes the sole source. They put bread 
on the table for Afghan children. They also keep drug dealers around 
the world in luxury automobiles.

Poppies are illicit drugs as well as medicine; cash crops as well as 
poison. Their derivatives kill pain in all forms: physical, psychic, 
existential. They also cause pain across the same spectrum. As 
morphine or codeine, poppies make life bearable for the sick; as 
opium or heroin, they turn the vulnerable into zombies.

The Taliban, in addition to being the scourge of the infidel and 
Orwellian Big Brothers to their own downtrodden sisters, are also the 
drug lords of the Hindu Kush. They buy, manage, protect, transport, 
and profit by the farmers' illicit crop. As such, these faith-based 
poppy pimps are an important part of the Afghan economy, controlling 
a slice estimated at around $600 million annually - some of it 
earmarked, no doubt, for the feeding, grooming, and sheltering of 
international terrorists.

In 2001 the Americans, practical souls as they are, decided to kill 
two birds with one stone. They combined the war on terrorism with the 
war on drugs. This seemed cost-effective, and it appealed to the 
frugality as well as to the moral sense of President George W. Bush's 
conservative base. Killing two birds with one stone isn't a bad idea, 
except missing two birds with one stone is a more likely outcome. 
Chances are, if you do that, both will fly away.

By trying to fight terrorism and drugs at the same time, the 
coalition forces have succeeded in rehabilitating the scruffiest 
exponents of Islamofascism, the Taliban, in the eyes of farmers. What 
the farmers saw was foreign troops invading and devastating their 
crops, and threatening dire consequences if they plant poppies again. 
The foreigners didn't say what else of comparable value to plant, so 
the farmers shrugged, provided cover for the Taliban (or not, as the 
spirit moved them) and increased the cultivation of the Afghan poppy 
crop by some 60 per cent, according to figures quoted by the 
University of Toronto's Nobel laureate, chemistry professor, John Polanyi.

Ironically, Afghanistan cultivates more poppies today than it did in 
2001. Polanyi argues that the trend "threatens to drive the country 
inexorably from a narco-economy to a narco-state." Possibly a 
narco-state ruled by the Taliban.

It seems opium can stupefy even people who never touch it. Nothing 
else can explain the American policy makers' asinine decision to 
reenact in 21st century Afghanistan the opium wars of the 19th 
century (which eventually led to the Boxer rebellion in China.) What, 
beside stupefaction, can explain a policy that tries to win the heart 
and mind of a farmer by burning his crops?

Polanyi believes that, far from trying to eliminate the poppy, the 
International Narcotics Control Board should license its cultivation 
in Afghanistan, as it does in such countries as France, India, or 
Turkey. Legalized, Afghan poppies could supply a fast growing world 
market for analgesics. Be that as it may, the time to discuss the 
elimination of the economic basis of people's lives comes after their 
hearts and minds have been won, their friendship secured, and an 
alternate basis implemented - not before.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman