To kill or not to kill the Afghan opium trade
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My first thought was "just kill it, opioid is bad and the Afghan opium trade funds the Taliban." But now even the Taliban is asking for help to eliminate the opium economy, the Western governments (including the USA) are having two minds about it, because:
- Lack of cheap opium from Afghanistan would lead the Mexican cartels to replace it with fentanyl, an arguably worse drug that can lead to even more opioid deaths.
- A sudden collapse of the opium trade in Afghanistan can trigger civil war and create another humanitarian crisis and "migration calamity," causing regional instability.
What say you?
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Afghan farmers have lost income of more than $1 billion from opium sales after the Taliban outlawed poppy cultivation, according to a report from the U.N. drugs agency published Sunday.
https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-taliban-opium-production-farmers-un-poppy-85c25084b559c566a7a7b59fd038ba37Afghanistan was the world’s biggest opium producer and a major source for heroin in Europe and Asia when the Taliban seized power in August 2021.
They pledged to wipe out the country’s drug cultivation industry and imposed a formal ban in April 2022, dealing a heavy blow to hundreds of thousands of farmers and day laborers who relied on proceeds from the crop to survive. Opium cultivation crashed by 95% after the ban, the report from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime said.
Until 2023, the value of Afghanistan’s opiate exports frequently outstripped the value of its legal exports. U.N. officials said the strong contraction of the opium economy is expected to have far-reaching consequences for the country as opiate exports before the ban accounted for between 9-14% of the national GDP.
