UN: World Drug Problem Stabilising (But Afghanistan Has Record Opium Crop)

Taken from Al-Jezeera News Agency, JUNE 26, 2007

Efforts to tackle the world's drug problems appear to be having some success as cultivation, production and abuse have stabilised worldwide, according to a United Nations agency.

The Vienna-based UN Office on Drugs and Crime said the Golden Triangle in southeast Asia, once one of the largest sources for heroin, was now "almost opium free".

Antonio Maria Costa, the head of UNODC, said in a statement late on Monday: "Recent data show that the runaway train of drug addiction has slowed down."



But the successes were masked by soaring production in southern Afghanistan which is now responsible for 92 per cent of opium production.

Costa said: "For almost all drugs - cocaine, heroin, cannabis and amphetamines - there are signs of overall stability, whether we speak of production, trafficking or consumption."

Poppy cultivation, which can be used to produce heroin, morphine and opium, has fallen by about 80 per cent since 2000 in the Golden Triangle, which includes parts of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand.

But despite the dramatic fall in southeast Asia, opium production reached a record 6,610 tonnes worldwide last year, up 43 per cent from 2005.

Afghanistan expansion
This was due to a near 50 per cent increase in production in Afghanistan.

The area under opium poppy cultivation in the country also expanded, from 1,040 sq km in 2005, to 1,650 sq km in 2006 - an increase of about 59 per cent.

"This is the largest area under opium poppy cultivation ever recorded in Afghanistan," the report said, noting that 62 per cent of the cultivation was concentrated in the country's southern region.

"For no other drug is production so concentrated in a single area."

Costa said Helmand province was becoming the world's biggest drug supplier, with illicit cultivation there larger than in the rest of the country put together.
'Drug cancer'

"Effective surgery on Helmand's drug and insurgency cancer will rid the world of the most dangerous source of its most dangerous narcotic and go a long way to bringing security to the region," Costa said in a statement.

Income from the industry in Afghanistan is more than $3bn annually.

Sophisticated laboratories inside Afghanistan are now converting 90 per cent of their opium into heroin and morphine before smuggling it around the world, UNODC officials said before the report's release. Until two years ago, Afghanistan exported the drug almost exclusively in its raw form.

The area used for coca cultivation - the raw material for producing cocaine - dropped by 29 per cent between 2000 and 2006, and by 52 per cent in Colombia alone.

But, although cultivation dropped last year, as much cocaine was produced worldwide as in 2005, "apparently due to improvements in coca cultivation and cocaine production technology," the report said.

Cocaine consumption
It also noted that while cocaine demand was decreasing in North America, "consumption increased significantly in Europe, doubling or tripling in several countries over the last decade".

The report expressed concerns about the situation in Africa, suggesting it could find itself at the crossroads of international drug crime.

"There are warning signs that Africa is also under attack, targeted by cocaine traffickers from the west - Colombia - and heroin smugglers in the east - Afghanistan," it said.

"This threat needs to be addressed quickly to stamp out drug-related crime, money-laundering and corruption, and to prevent the spread of drug use that could cause havoc across a continent already plagued by other tragedies."

Cannabis, or marijuana, remained the most widely used drug. Of the 200 million people (aged 15-64) who are drug-users, about 160 million take cannabis, the report said.

But Costa remained positive, noting that "for the first time in years, we do not see an upward trend in the global production and consumption of cannabis".

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Allied forces have been in Afghanistan since it’s invasion on October 7, 2001. So what have the United States, aided by the United Kingdom, Canada, and supported by a coalition of other countries including several from the NATO alliance done to reduce this evil crop that the Taliban had almost eroded – The only way to kill off addiction and demand for drugs in the West is to kill off the supply or kill the flow of supply. I doubt if governments in the West are bothered to deal with this issue otherwise we would not be talking about this subject.

Some Fast Facts (Taken from the Time, UK)
# A 49% increase in opium production in Afghanistan has seen a new record in the world production.
# Afghanistan accounts for 92% of global illict opium production.
# Of the 11m heroin addicts in the world, 3.3m of them in Europe.
# Cannabis is consumed by 160m people worldwide.
# Over the 2005-2006 period, 25m people are estimated to have used amphetamines at least once in the previous 12 months· More than 12% of Afghanistan's population is involved in poppy cultivation.

Why The US Is Losing Its War On Cocaine

America has spent billions battling the drug industry in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru. And the result? Production as high as ever, street prices at a low, and the governments of the region in open revolt. Hugh O'Shaughnessy reports from La Paz, Bolivia

Taken from The Independent, 27 May 2007

The immensely costly "war on drugs" in Latin America is slowly collapsing like a Zeppelin with a puncture. The long-forecast failure for strategies which involve police and military in forcibly suppressing narcotics - first decreed by President Richard Nixon decades ago - is now pitifully evident in Bolivia, one of the poorest countries of the Western hemisphere.

The estimated $25bn (£13bn) that Washington has spent trying to control narcotics over the past 15 years in Latin America seems to have been wasted.

In 2005, according to UN guesses - and, amid merciless political spinning of what few facts there are- Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, the main producers of cocaine, had the capacity to produce 910 metric tons a year. As more productive strains of coca bushes appear, production has been increasing. Unsurprisingly, the price of cocaine on US streets has tumbled, according to the White House drug tzar John Walters, to $135 (£70) a gram, a fraction of the $600 a gram it was fetching in 1981. The purity of cocaine has gone from 60 per cent in mid-2003 to more than 70 per cent last October. Like the conflict in Iraq, the US's other great war is now being visibly lost.

Here, indigent Bolivian President Evo Morales, once a poverty-stricken llama herder and itinerant trumpet player, is resisting pressure from the Bush government to eradicate coca bushes by fire and sword.

The Bolivian leader is no lover of cocaine and his policies are summed up in the slogan "no to drugs, no to cocaine". More than 5,000 hectares of coca bushes were destroyed last year by growers voluntarily. "We did it without violating human rights", says Morales.

But he refuses to ban the consumption of coca leaves, which country people regard as gifts from heaven: the indigenous peoples have been chewing them for thousands of years as an aid to survival at 14,000 feet in the perishingly bleak highlands of the Andes which surround this city.

Their teeth are sometimes discoloured but otherwise they have come to little harm. Morales has no hesitation in saying that his refusal to allow foreigners to dictate Bolivia's policy on what Bolivians call Mama Coca has been one of the secrets of his political success. "The sacred coca leaf meant that we poor people are in government today," he proclaims.

Morales' stand was backed up here earlier this month when Jean Ziegler, the influential former Swiss parliamentarian, now the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, announced that promoting the cultivation and consumption of coca "doesn't go against international treaties to fight drug trafficking and organised crime."

But the determination of Morales, the leader of a poor country of nine million people, is only a tiny part of Latin America's rejection of the "war on drugs". In a Venezuela enriched by high prices for its oil exports, President Hugo Chavez, himself a political and financial supporter of Morales and ally of Fidel Castro, is placing strict controls on his country's co-operation with the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The democratically elected Chavez sees the DEA as an arm of a government which was involved with the right-wing coup d'état in 2002, which toppled him briefly.

He sees it as devoted as much to Washington's political and military strategies in Latin America as to the battle against narcotics. The plain-speaking Chavez, who has called President Bush "a devil", has accused the DEA of spying.

Pedro Carreno, Chavez's justice minister, has said that Venezuela would not allow the DEA to mount anti-drug operations on its territory. Chavez has also forbidden overflights by US government aircraft. Carreno suggested that instead of Plan Colombia, the US "should apply a Plan Washington, New York, or Miami, so that they fly over their own air space, and take care of their coast and border because 85 per cent of the drugs that are produced in Latin America go to the United States."

Now a third Latin American leader, the newly elected President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, has announced that his country will ignore US instructions in the "war on drugs". He has announced that he will no longer allow US forces to occupy a large base at the Pacific port of Manta, which was leased to them by a previous government and which the Pentagon says is used for aircraft monitoring cocaine shipments between Peru and Colombia. Many small farmers in Ecuador along the border with Colombia have seen their crops and livestock ruined and their own health affected by the spraying of poisons, such as glyphosate, by Colombian and US pilots in a so far vain attempt to destroy coca bushes in Colombia. The pesticides have drifted over the international border spraying Ecuadorean farms.

Last week, Professor Paul Hunt of Essex University, the UN Special Rapporteur on Health, speaking in Ecuador said: "There is credible, reliable evidence that the aerial spraying of glyphosate along the Colombia-Ecuador border damages the health of people living in Ecuador.

There is also reliable evidence that the aerial spraying damages their mental health. Military helicopters sometimes accompany the aerial spraying and the entire experience can be terrifying, especially for children. "

If this continues the Ecuadoreans have threatened to shoot the offending aircraft down.

But it is in the Colombian capital city, Bogota, that the "war on drugs" is seriously falling apart.

Colombia's president, Alvaro Uribe, is in deep political trouble as his opponents dig up unsavoury evidence of his past. He was for years seen as the strongest ally of the US and Britain in South America - he has been received several times at the White House and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office paid him a substantial bursary in 1998 for two years' study at St Antony's College, Oxford before he was elected president in 2002. As a model recruit into the "war on drugs" his country has received $5.4bn under the so-called Plan Colombia from Washington for drug control, more US foreign aid than any other country except Israel and Egypt.

Yet Colombia is estimated to be producing nearly 800 tons of cocaine every year and it has been an open secret for years that senior politicians and the armed forces are deeply mixed up in drug dealing and the right-wing death squads - coyly referred to as "paramilitaries" are also involved in the trade.

In February, Uribe had to sack his foreign minister Maria Consuelo Araujo because of her family connections with the death squads and the drug trade. Uribe is becoming something of a pariah and his support is falling away, even in Washington. Senator Al Gore withdrew from a conference on climate change in Latin America to avoid being photographed with him because of allegations linking Uribe and government members to death squads and drug dealing. Gore called the claims deeply troubling. In 2001, some senior politicians signed the so-called Pact of Ralito, which bound them to well-known drug smugglers with names such as Jorge 40, Don Berna, Salvatore Mancuso and Diego Vecino. Other accusations against Uribe include one by an opposition senator that death squads used farms belonging to Uribe's family to carry out meetings and killings in the 1990s.

Earlier this month, the Vice President, Francisco Santos announced that "more than 40 members of congress" could go to prison because of their links to drugs and death squads. More than a dozen senators, congressmen and political insiders have been arrested. This month, two police generals were sacked.

The truth is also emerging about the Colombian army, beloved of the US government but widely hated by many Colombians for its closeness to the death squads. Senator Patrick Leahy ordered a temporary freeze on tens of millions of dollars of US military aid after the Colombian army commander, General Mario Montoya, was found to be deeply involved with the death squads.

Leahy condemned the waste of US money in Colombia: "When Plan Colombia began, we were told it would cut by half the amount of cocaine in five years. Six years and $5bn later, it has not had any measurable effect on the amount of cocaine entering our country."

Big business is also caught up in drug dealing. In March, Chiquita Brands International, a US banana multinational, was fined $25m by the US Justice Department for having funded the AUC, the principal Colombian death squad which is closely linked to international drug-smuggling. The collapse of the "war on drugs" in Latin America is of a piece with Tony Blair's failure to control drugs in the UK by police action and imprisonment. Britain's drug use rates are among the highest in Europe and there are 327,000 problem drug users. The failure to stem the supply of heroin is illustrated by the fall in price of a gram, from £70 in 2000 to £54 in 2005.

The annual number of drug offenders jailed more than doubled between 1994 and 2005 and the average length of their sentences went up. The courts handed out nearly three times as much prison time in 2004 as they did 10 years earlier.

Last month, an inquiry for the UK Drug Policy Commission said: "The research suggests that the greatest reductions in drug-related harm have come from investment in treatment and harm reduction. However, the bulk of expenditure on drug policy in the UK is still devoted to the enforcement of drug laws".

In Britain, as in Latin America, drugs clearly can't be controlled by armies and police forces.
Hugh O'Shaughnessy is the author with Sue Branford of 'Chemical Warfare in Colombia: the Costs of Coca Fumigation'

Cocaine Wars Make Port Colombia’s Deadliest City

Taken from The New York Times, May 22, 2007
By SIMON ROMERO

Visitors to this city can be forgiven for thinking no place is safe here. Gunfire often echoes through the slums surrounding its port, the country’s most important on the Pacific coast. As larger cities have calmed, Buenaventura has emerged as the deadliest urban center in Colombia’s long internal war.

Soldiers search almost every car at checkpoints on the winding road from Cali. Guerrillas recently fired mortar shells at the police headquarters. The stately Hotel Estación, a neo-Classical gem built in 1928, where executives come to hammer out deals to import cars or export coffee, is guarded by dozens of soldiers in combat fatigues.

“It’s as if we have a little Haiti within Colombia,” said Lt. Nikolai Viviescas, 25, a police officer who was transferred from Bogotá six months ago. “It feels like another country.”

Although Bogotá, the capital, and other cities have become secure and prosperous enough that it is possible there to forget about this country’s four-decade-old civil conflict for a while, Buenaventura is a different story.

Killings in this city of about 300,000 climbed 30 percent last year, to 408, giving Buenaventura the nation’s highest homicide rate at 144 per 100,000, more than seven times the rate in Bogotá and four times that of Medellín. And this year, the police say, 222 people have been killed here.

A vast majority of the killings are the product of a narrow territorial conflict over control of the edge of the city’s slums, acres of wooden shacks built on stilts over the sea. From these makeshift wharves, police and naval officials say, fast boats depart with cocaine for points north. Buenaventura’s geography, crucial in connecting Colombia to the global flow of trade, also holds strategic cachet for drug traffickers.

Despite receiving more than $5 billion in antinarcotics and counterinsurgency aid from the United States this decade, making the country the largest recipient of American aid in the hemisphere, Colombia remains the world’s largest cocaine producer and the supplier of 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States.

Drug lords, rebels and resurgent paramilitary gangs all draw on Buenaventura’s slum dwellers as their foot soldiers.

The police say that many of the combatants on the rebels’ side belong to the Manuel Cepeda Vargas Urban Front, a cell of the main rebel group FARC that is based in Cali and opposes the Autodefensas Campesinas del Pacífico, composed mostly of former paramilitary fighters.

“Nothing in this fight is about ideology,” said Antero Viveros, the head of a community group in Lleras, a large slum controlled by the guerrillas. “It is about drugs, with members of one ethnicity killing each other.”

Despite its emergence as Colombia’s most dangerous city, people displaced by fighting in the countryside still see Buenaventura as a refuge. About 42,000 refugees have arrived here since 1998, mostly Afro-Colombians from rural areas, according to the federal government. They swell the ranks of what may be Colombia’s poorest slums.

“If you’re hungry, you’ll do whatever imaginable to survive,” said Fernando Nuñez, 29, a Lleras resident who ekes out a living repairing old cellphones.

President Álvaro Uribe has forcefully criticized the violence here and sent new police and navy commanders to the city at the start of the year. About 2,000 soldiers and police officers, who also wear combat uniforms and carry semiautomatic weapons, patrol Buenaventura.

Still, critics say authorities have long neglected Buenaventura’s problems in part because Afro-Colombians receive scant federal attention. Nongovernmental groups say Afro-Colombians account for up to a quarter of the country’s population of 44 million, by some measures giving Colombia the largest black population in the Spanish-speaking world. And more than 80 percent of Buenaventura’s residents are black.

This month, when the president chose Paula Marcela Moreno Zapata as culture minister, was the first time an Afro-Colombian ascended to a cabinet position in the country’s history. Yet political analysts and black advocacy groups said the appointment was largely to appease Democrats in Washington who complain of racial exclusion in Colombia as they weigh a trade agreement.

“The war in Buenaventura is not going to be ended by symbolic actions from Bogotá,” said Rosaliano Riascos, a Buenaventura native who fled the city after a wave of paramilitary-led killings several years ago. Mr. Riascos, who heads an independent black advocacy group in Bogotá, said it had been a year since he returned to Buenaventura to visit family.

“Buenaventura is a no-man’s land,” he said.

The entrance to Lleras looks like that of any shantytown elsewhere in Colombia, with cinder-block shacks and a few paved streets. But deeper into the slum, the structures are made from discarded wood, with newcomers squeezing into lean-tos alongside older houses. Rusted barrels collect rain from zinc roofs, the only source of fresh water.

Sewage bubbles down trash-strewn dirt roads before flowing into the sea. Stereos blare vallenato and reggaetón music. And precariously built homes are hoisted above the water on spindly pieces of wood.

Many of the residents of these hovels hesitate to offer their names out of fear of retaliation over what they might say. One middle-aged man, offering a visitor a cup of rum from the steps of his house, said he had worked as a stevedore at the port years ago before losing that job. “Now,” he said, “I do nothing.”

Some economists hold up Buenaventura as an example of the risks of exposing certain areas of developing economies to market forces. María del Pilar Castillo, an economist at Valle University in Cali, said many residents lost economic security when the city’s port was privatized more than a decade ago, cutting its work force and reducing benefits.

With taxes on the imports flowing through Buenaventura’s port largely going directly to the central government, the city reaps few benefits from international trade, even as Colombia’s economy grows more than 6 percent a year. So the poor in Buenaventura, with an unemployment rate of about 28 percent, resort to the drug trade.

“There is no other viable industry here, so there are no other viable jobs,” said Ana María Mercedes Cano, director of Buenaventura’s Chamber of Commerce. “So we live in a situation with violence all around us.”

Civilians are increasingly caught in the cross-fire. Guerrillas were blamed for an attack earlier this year in which five people, including one police officer, were killed when a homemade mortar shell was fired at a police truck. Security officials here say laws that are lax on minors, who carry out many of the attacks, make it difficult to reduce the killings.

“We have a justice system designed for Switzerland, yet we have no Swiss here,” said Col. Yamil Moreno, the chief of police in Buenaventura. In the same breath, Colonel Moreno, who was transferred here from the north, callously described Buenaventura’s dying combatants.

“These vagabonds,” he said, “are good only for drinking, dancing and killing.”

Exile And Extinction Face A Tribe That Lost Everything To Cocaine

Taken from The Times, UK, May 19, 2007
By Catherine Philp in Chocó, Colombia

The Wounaan Indians are used to newcomers. Over the past 500 years the Spanish conquistadors, freed African slaves and Marxist guerrillas have all tried to encroach on their ancestral land. But the Wounaan, one of the oldest indigenous peoples in the region, have held firm. And then came the coca leaf.

Living in small villages of wooden houses on stilts in riverside clearings in the jungles of Chocó, the Wounaan had largely succeeded in keeping out of Colombia’s bloody conflicts. They hunted, fished and farmed along the banks of the San Juan River, left alone by the battling rebels, paramilitaries and government troops.

Then, three years ago, the guerrillas came with an order at gunpoint. “They said we had to grow coca or else leave,” Fernando, a Wounaan leader, said. “And so we began planting it on our lands.”

The arrival of coca cultivation set in motion a chain of events that has left the Wounaan divided, displaced and at risk of extinction.

With cocaine increasingly the drug of choice in Europe – 1.2 million Britons are regular users – the plight of the Wounaan, and of Colombia’s three million other displaced, are prompting a major rethink in how to police the world’s most important drugs war.

It is more than four decades since the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc, began their armed struggle to install a Marxist regime. In the 1990s, with added pressure from right-wing paramilitaries, the guerrillas became increasingly dependent on cocaine to finance their campaign, to the point where it has superseded the Utopian vision.

Since 2000 the US – where more than 75 per cent of Colombia’s cocaine exports end up – has spent $700 million (£350 million) a year to help to root out drug traffickers and eliminate coca crops. Plan Colombia, which began as a mixture of social programmes, crop eradication and military action, quickly lost sight of its social elements.

Chocó, an extravagantly fertile eco-region along Colombia’s Pacific Coast, was never traditionally an area for coca cultivation. Although coca has grown wild in Colombia since time immemorial, and was chewed by indigenous people as a mild stimulant, like coffee, it did not naturally take root in Chocó.

As spraying began in provinces such as Caquetá and Putu-mayo to the east and south, the rebels who supervised the growing of the coca crops started moving into areas farther afield, like the rainforests of Chocó.

Under threat of death or expulsion, the Wounaan began planting coca, which the guerrillas then bought from them. The crop was lucrative: a three inch cube of pressed coca would fetch them 1.8 million pesos ($900). The rice they had grown before fetched only 4,000 pesos a small sack.

Not everyone liked what else the coca brought. “At the beginning there was money,” Fernando said. “But then it started to destroy the culture. Drinking and prostitution, all these things begin when the money comes.”

In March last year leaders in Union-Wounaan, the largest settlement, sent word to the guerrillas that their coca-grow-ing days were over. A day later guerrillas seized a teacher from his classroom. His mutilated body was found hours later. The next day a tribal leader was seized and beaten to death.

The killings caused panic in the community. More than 1,000 of the area’s 3,500 Wounaan fled upriver to the town of Istmina, with hundreds more fleeing elsewhere into the jungle. Hundreds more wanted to leave but those arriving in Istmina said that there were no boats to bring them and they remained trapped upriver.

The displaced tribespeople took shelter in a house by the river, crammed 30 to a room. Exile proved too hard for many and some climbed into boats and travelled back. Those who had opposed the guerrillas had no choice but to stay – 47 of them were given asylum in Panama and more than 70 remain in Istmina.

In recent weeks right-wing paramilitaries who have refused to disarm under a government programme have started to move onto Wounaan land, seeking control of the coca crops themselves.

José Llanos, a tribal leader who has been speaking out against coca cultivation, arrived in Istmina with his family last month after receiving death threats from the paramilitaries. He told of a community caught between two illegal armies.

“We cannot be neutral,” he said. “Wherever we live, the other group thinks we are with that group. And both groups want the coca.”

The Wounaan join a human tide of migration across Colombia. More than three million people have been forcibly displaced across the country, second only to Sudan. Every day, 850 more people are driven from their homes. Alvaro Uribe, Colombia’s President, has received plaudits for improving security, though many blame his policies for the new crises in far-flung corners of the country previously little touched by the war.

“It is true that the violence is no longer affecting the governing classes as much,” Marie-Helene Verney, spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency in Colombia, said. “But the situation is very different in the countryside where voiceless minorities are coming under threat.”

In Condoto, a riverside cathedral town, hundreds of the displaced inhabit rundown slums that they built after fleeing their villages. Afro-Colombi-ans, the marginalised descendants of former slaves, have been here as long as five years. “I don’t believe we will ever go back,” Maria Cesario, a heavily pregnant mother of six, says. She is probably right. The vast majority of displaced Colombians never return home.

For the Government, there is little political capital to be won from helping the displaced. An average displaced family receives just one quarter of the subsidy given to the family of an illegal militiaman who turns in his guns. But for the Wounaan, there is more at stake than for most.

“The conflict has put their way of life at risk,” Ms Verney said. “They have been forced to leave their ancestral lands and now they find themselves at risk of extinction.”

Many more of Colombia’s one million indigenous people are also under such a threat. A year ago, 80 members of the hunter-gatherer Nukak tribe walked out of the jungle after months on the run from armed groups who ordered them off their land to grow coca. Only 500 remain in the jungle and fears are growing for their survival. For the Wounaan, the future looks bleak. In Istmina, they live in their own small community by the river, surrounded by an alien Afro-Colombian culture of hard drinking and casual sex. An air of tragedy hangs over them. All have taken Spanish names, the ones used here, to hide the Wounaan names that appeared on the guerrillas’ hit lists.

With their teachers dead, they struggle to teach their children to read and write their own language. At school they are taught in Spanish, which few Wounaan can speak.

At night, they try to perform traditional dances to preserve their culture but they find little to celebrate. They live as close to the river as they can. “The river is like our blood. Just like somebody without blood cannot live, we cannot live without the river,” said Fernando.

But their ancestral lands are far away and they have no prospect of return. “The land is like our mother. To lose it is very hard.”

Plan Colombia, the programme that drove the coca crops deep into their forests, is nearly over.

While the acreage of coca has shrunk, the yield has increased, so the amount of cocaine produced has not changed.

That fact, and revelations about links between the Government and illegal paramilitaries, have led to a suspension in the US aid money that funds it.

A new scheme, Plan Colombia II, has been hatched with less emphasis on military action and more on social programmes. But sceptics say they have seen this scheme before, and give warning that it may go the way of the original plan.

For the Wounaan, such geo-political manoeuvring is mean-ingless. But one thing they do know.

If no one wanted the little green leaf, no one would plant it. As Colombia gears up for the next chapter in the war on drugs, a dying tribe has this plea for the outside world.

“If nobody bought the drug, it wouldn’t be produced,” José Llanos says. “To those who buy it, it’s just merchandise. For us, it is disaster. They have our blood on their hands.”

Trading in misery
# 80% of the world’s cocaine is produced in Colombia
# $400bn - value of the global trade in the drug
# 500 hectares of rainforest cleared each year for new coca cultivation in Chocó province alone
# 3,000 people killed each year in Colombia’s cocaine-fuelled conflict
# 3m people displaced in what the UN describes as the worst humanitarian crisis outside Africa
# 60% of the world’s cocaine is consumed in the US
# 6.8% of Britons have tried the drug
# 5% of British banknotes have significant traces of cocaine indicating that they have been used to snort the drug

Afghanistan and the war against drugs

Last week the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called on Russia and Europe to do more to stem drug trafficking from Afghanistan warning that it is fuelling a Taliban resurgence and threatens to undermine Afghanistan.

"I'm concerned about the role that narcotics are playing in this sense: when there's that much money involved, you have to worry that it is going to be attractive," he told reporters.

The United States currently has 23,000 troops in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld put the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) at about another 15,000 to 20,000 and Afghan security forces at about 70,000.


Some facts you might NOT know:

Afghanistan is the world’s largest grower of opium poppies. This tiny country produces nearly three quarters of the world’s opium supply.

When the Taliban came into power in 1997 they began cracking down on the opium growers. We may have detested the Taliban and their (so called) oppressive regime but at least they did something positive!

Poppy fields were burned and the heroin processing plants were shut down. Within a few years opium production in Afghanistan had plummeted from CIA estimated 4,042 tons per year to only 81.3 tons per year

In 2001 The United States provided $43 million worth of supplies (primarily wheat) to humanitarian relief organizations in Afghanistan. This was widely reported by critics of U.S. policy to be a $43 million reward to the Taliban for reducing poppy production.

Global Oil companies also had an interest in Afghanistan to build pipelines through Afghanistan to link Caspian Sea oil and gas reserves to Central and South Asia. Members of the Taliban had visited the US to look at the plans for this operation.

All was going well…. until 9/11. The group that was bankrolled by the United States to fight off the Russians (as part of group of Mujahideen) did the unthinkable and attacked America (well Al-Qaeda to be specific who were protected bt the Taliban in Afghanistan).

The United States decided to find the culprits and occupied Afghanistan later in 2001. Poppy production hit a record high since the fall of the Taliban government. In 2004, under the U.S. occupation, an estimated 4,950 metric tons of opium gum potentially producing 582 metric tons of heroin were harvested. Most of these opium would be sold in Europe and not the United States.


Why didn’t the Americans destroy the poppy fields and the heroin processing plants?

In order to minimize American casualties during the invasion, U.S. forces allied themselves with a group known as the Northern Alliance. The Northern Alliance was a band of warlords who, in addition to controlling their own private armies, also controlled much of the drug trade in Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance is also supported and funded by several countries, including Russia, Iran and India.

Many warlords joined the Northern Alliance in order to defend their poppy fields against the Taliban’s crackdown. In exchange for their help against the Taliban, America allowed Northern Alliance members to continue growing poppies with relative impunity. Not only had the drug trade blossomed since the American invasion, it also had become far more profitable.

The current Afghan government has promised to crack down on drug trafficking, but their efforts have yielded few tangible results. The poppy growers have simply moved their fields away from government controlled areas and into the wild hinterlands controlled by the warlords.


So what should be done - What are the solutions?

Donald Rumsfeld is right in saying that Europe needs to do more in stopping the drug trafficking but so do the Americans.

With so many troops in Afghanistan I find it hard to understand why the Afghan government & the US find it difficult to destroy poppy crops. Maybe it is not in their best interest to do so? Maybe it would be better to reintroduce the Taliban? At least when they were in power they controlled the drug trade and stabilised the country.

Secondly, we need to get a better understanding why farmers grow Opium. Opium is not just a crop in Afghanistan; it is a way of life. It is used for trading with other goods, a form or barter. Farmers need to be introduced to alternative crops as a means of income. The Afghan government needs to subsidize these farmers, ensure proper infrastructure is in place to help the farmers and have stronger law enforcement in place.

Finally, the Americans (and United Nations) clearly need to do more. Now that they have established a correlation between the farming of opium and funding of terrorist (what took them so long?) Will they be going after the Northern Alliance (and its Warlords) rather than the Taliban? Do they know the difference? Have they realised that they “themselves” are responsible for the situation? Do they care? If they do maybe they will take it seriously and prioritised the war against drugs in this region.