Justus For All

Anne Applebaum at washingtonpost.com (via Ilya Somin of the Volohk Conspiracy)

Yet by far the most depressing aspect of the Afghan poppy crisis is that it exists at all — because it doesn’t have to. To see what I mean, look at the history of Turkey, where once upon a time the drug trade also threatened the country’s political and economic stability. Just like Afghanistan, Turkey had a long tradition of poppy cultivation. Just like Afghanistan, Turkey worried that poppy eradication could “bring down the government.” Just like Afghanistan, Turkey — this was the era of “Midnight Express”– was identified as the main source of the heroin sold in the West. Just like in Afghanistan, a ban was tried, and it failed.As a result, in 1974 the Turks, with American and U.N. support, tried a different tactic. They began licensing poppy cultivation for the purpose of producing morphine, codeine and other legal opiates. Legal factories were built to replace the illegal ones. Farmers registered to grow poppies, and they paid taxes. You wouldn’t necessarily know this from the latest White House drug strategy report– which devotes several pages to Afghanistan but doesn’t mention Turkey — but the U.S. government still supports the Turkish program, even requiring U.S. drug companies to purchase 80 percent of what the legal documents euphemistically refer to as “narcotic raw materials” from the two traditional producers, Turkey and India.

Why not add Afghanistan to this list? The only good arguments against doing so — as opposed to the silly, politically correct “just say no” arguments — are technical: that the same weak or nonexistent bureaucracy will be no better at licensing poppy fields than it has been at destroying them, or that some of the raw material will still fall into the hands of the drug cartels. Yet some of these issues can be resolved, by building processing factories at the local level and working within local power structures. And even if the program succeeds in stopping only half of the drug trade, a huge chunk of Afghanistan’s economy will still emerge from the gray market; the power of the drug barons will be reduced; and, most important, Western money will have been visibly spent helping Afghan farmers survive, instead of destroying their livelihoods. The director of the Senlis Council, a group that studies the drug problem in Afghanistan, told me he reckons that the best way to “ensure more Western soldiers get killed” is to expand poppy eradication.

Being fairly strongly oppossed to the Drug War here, it is perhaps unsurprising that I think the Drug War in Afghanistan is a really bad idea.  Applebaum’s idea, absent legalization of Opium, is not a bad one from my perspective.  It is of course somewhat ironic that one of the few things we liked about the Taliban, before 9/11, was that they had largely succeeded in stamping out Aghanistan’s poppy cultivation.