The opium scourge

I found this op-ed today which dares to take an edgy anti-opium stance (way to put yourself out there man!). And like many people who are passionate about what they believe, author George Putnam throws it down like it is. Some tasty bits follow:

It is this reporter's opinion that the Bush administration has decided not to destroy the opium crop in Afghanistan even though the president previously linked the Afghan drug trade directly to terrorism.

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Opium grows on 477,000 acres of land in Afghanistan. That’s a 17 percent increase over last year’s acreage. Afghanistan now accounts for 93 percent of the global production of opium which provides the raw material for heroin.

U.S. forces, if allowed, could destroy the crop using aerial spraying techniques. But President Hamid Karzai rejects U.S. offers to spray the illegal crop claiming the herbicide would affect livestock, other crops, and water supplies.

Further opposition reportedly comes from the CIA which claims destruction of the Afghan opium would destabilize the Pakistani government … would threaten to overthrow President Pervez Musharraf’s government if the crops were destroyed.

Arguments like these always seem to boggle my mind. If destroying poppy fields causes more damage and instability, then doing it on purely moral grounds would be a disaster. The opium market would not dry up overnight, and the supply would simply move somewhere else, probably into Pakistan and Iran, or even Venezuela. Poppies can grow all over the place. Poisoning Afghanistan accomplishes nothing but a temporary setback in cartel supply chain logistics. Today's organized drug syndicates can adapt way faster than Wal-Mart.