If you can't beat them, join them: the radical plan to legalise the opium trade

from The Sydney Morning Herald

Paul McGeough,

It is a brazen idea. But support is growing for claims that the best way to attack the Afghan opium crisis is to harness it as a legitimate supplier to a hungry international pharmaceutical industry.

The argument is that faltering efforts to eradicate opium in Afghanistan are a misguided waste of billions of dollars.

Between them, the US and British governments have already pledged $US2 billion to anti-narcotics campaigns here, but much of it leaks to corruption or is sunk in security and judicial revitalisation projects that will take years to bear fruit.

The Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies believes money spent on eradication is money wasted.

In a report last week it took a provocative stand: "The bulk of the $US500 million to be spent on eradication in Helmand and Kandahar in 2007 [should be switched] to alternative solutions, including purchasing poppy crops at farm gate value ... and to credit-schemes to enhance substitute livelihood programs and interdiction".

But London and Washington insist that opium cash underpins the Taliban insurgency and that the flow of funds must be cut - for security reasons as much as stemming the drug flow to the rest of the world.

Outlining what it called a shared interest between drug traffickers and the Taliban insurgency to prevent the spread of central authority, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group argued in a report last year: "Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in Helmand.

"The site of some of the worst violence of 2006, the province is home to 42 per cent of the country's total poppy cultivation and the areas of major drug production and violence show remarkable continuity."

The reality of reconstructing Afghanistan is this: despite billions in aid since the US-led invasion of 2001, the number of families turning to drugs has almost doubled, acreages have exploded exponentially and the eradication of just 10 per cent of last year's bumper crop failed to deter farmers from what is estimated to be even greater planting this year.

Village headmen who were asked about the benefits they had received in the foreign-funded rebuilding of the country, reported disappointing results to a United Nations survey.

Just over half had received help with health services (54 per cent). But much smaller numbers had received help in agricultural (18 per cent) and roads (12 per cent). And virtually none had been assisted with drinking water, electricity, food, irrigation, jobs or mine clearance.

For now, the villages have the unlikely support of the World Bank. Instead of targeting opium farmers, it wants to see the trafficking king-pins take the fall.

"The critical adverse impact of actions against drugs [now] is on poor farmers and rural wage labourer.

"Any counter-narcotics strategy needs to keep short-run expectations modest, avoid worsening the situation of the poor and adequately focus on longer-term rural development."

The most vocal advocate of legalising the Afghan crop is Senlis, a European NGO that has received many a cold shoulder as it has undertaken extensive research on bringing Afghanistan's opium farmers into the legal domain of pharmaceuticals over the last two years.

But the British Medical Association last month backed Senlis, calling for at least an investigation of legalising Afghan opium; and in Canada, which has almost 3000 troops in the south of Afghanistan, there is growing political support.

In the 1970s, Turkey rejected an American demand that poppy farming be outlawed and eradicated, arguing that it would bring down the government. Instead, despite deep reservations in Washington, it legalised the industry which now earns an estimated $US60 million a year supplying the makings of medical morphine and codeine to the pharmaceutical industry.

About 600,000 Turks today rely on regulated poppy production for their income and with only small quantities of Turkish opium being diverted to the heroin market.

The Americans are aghast at any such proposal for Afghanistan - too much corruption and the traffickers would always out-bid any regulated buyers, they say. "In the absence of sophisticated law enforcement, opium really destined for the black market would be produced under the pretence of a legal system," the US Bureau of International Narcotics claimed last week.

The Senlis retort was lost in the ether. Wasn't it better to legitimate some of the Afghan trade than to see it all dispensed through syringes in Soho and King's Cross?

And the mere suggestion of legalising the Afghan trade has Turkey and India, another legal producer, up in arms. They claim that if their guaranteed share of the legal market is reduced, more of their harvest would be diverted to the dark side.

Senlis argues that a fatal flaw in the Afghan counter-insurgency is the treatment, by the Americans in particular, of the Taliban as a homogenous, jihadist organisation.

In a report last month, it said: "Afghans who are a part of the insurgency for economic reasons [ie, poppy farmers] ... are targeted with the blunt instruments of counter insurgency - bombings and fighting.

"No attempt is made to drive a wedge between the hardcore leadership of the Taliban who do have fundamentalist beliefs and the large group of Taliban fighters who are involved because of the fact they have to make a living to feed their families."

The Senlis argument is that widespread civilian casualties in a foreign-driven war generate civilian disillusionment and protest. Development is undermined and reconstruction projects are postponed because of the lack of security - prompting more Afghans to turn their back on their shaky new government.

Its report claims: "Even after five years ... Afghanistan continues to face a reconstruction crisis of unprecedented proportions. Pressure on the Afghan Government to implement untimely and aggressive eradication-based counter-narcotic policies illustrates a failure on the part of the international community to recognise that Afghanistan's opium crisis is not merely a matter of illegal drug cultivation and production.

"Whether inside or outside Afghanistan, the current insurgency has an enormous economic advantage - extreme poverty and structural unemployment [make] it relatively easy to increase both its support and recruitment base. If we look at what the Taliban fighters are earning, compared to other professionals, the salary is very high.

"Compared to jobs in the army or in the police force, their pay is three to four times less."

Washington focus is clear. For eight years, it has been funding a controversial counter-narcotics campaign in Colombia and recently it reassigned its Bogota ambassador William Wood to Kabul. Late last month, the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, held up the Colombian aerial-spraying campaign as an example for Afghanistan - despite its questionable outcome.

Afghan traffickers respond by arguing that the problem is in the West - if there was no abuse in those countries, production in Afghanistan would not be the crisis it has become.

A dealer in Helmand resorted to the classic "you people" charge, telling the Herald: "It's you people that sustain the opium industry by using heroin - fix it on your end!"

Fair enough. Even the World Bank acknowledges his claim. Warning that it would take decades to phase out the industry, it pleaded in a report last year for "an equally smart and effective strategy to curtail demand for opiates in consuming countries".