In Kabul hospital, half the patients who need opiate-based painkillers are writhing in agony because they have none—while in the fields outside and across Afghanistan, farmers trying to grow opiates are having their fields trashed and livelihoods destroyed by western troops. This is just the most ironic intersection between the west's "war on drugs" and what the World Health Organisation calls "an unprecedented global pain crisis."
The world is suffering from an opium drought. The International Narcotics Control Board calculates that the US, Britain, France, Canada, Spain, Australia and Japan consume 80 per cent of the world's medical opiates, leaving the remaining 80 per cent of humanity with the dregs. Even in developed countries, in cancer care alone there is a need for 550 metric tons more opium every year, and overall—according to a University of Toronto study—only about 24 per cent of the demand for medical opiates is now being met.
At the same time, a violent and utopian attempt to physically stop Afghans from growing the opiates we need is causing us to lose a battle there that Tony Blair has called "essential for the safety of civilisation." Human Rights Watch warns that the Taliban now effectively control southern Afghanistan, and many observers warn they could be in a position to march on Kabul and topple Hamid Karzai's elected government within a couple of years.
The war on the Taliban is being lost because the soldiers sent to fight it are also being forced to wage a "war on drugs" that requires the destruction of a major part of the Afghan economy. This summer, Emmanuel Reinert, executive director of the Senlis Council, a development think tank, commissioned around 30 researchers to find out why so many southern Afghans were turning to the Taliban when they cheered their defeat five years ago. He found that, "The Taliban revival is directly, intimately related to the crop eradication programme. It could not have happened if the US was not aggressively destroying crops. And it is the single biggest reason Afghans turned against the foreigners."
Reinert adds, "If you look at where the Americans have carried out the forced eradication programmes, it's where people cannot feed their families because their crops have been destroyed. That's where the Taliban is opportunistically gaining support." The Christian Science Monitor, in a long investigation, found that international drugs prohibition has also caused the fledgling Afghan police force to be crippled by corruption at the moment of its birth. By demanding that more than one third of the country's total economy be criminalised—and therefore placed in the hands of armed gangs and warlords, rather than taxed by the legitimate government—prohibition ensured non-state actors will always have bigger guns and more cash than the state.
The only solution the US seems to have is to speed up eradication. The state department has commissioned studies into the viability of a clone of "Plan Colombia," in which vast amounts of chemicals were sprayed on the Colombian countryside, creating ecological wastelands and cancer epidemics. Hamid Karzai is known to be a strong opponent of this suggestion, but he may yet be overruled.
In the long term, there is only one solution to narco-states: bring the global drugs trade—some 5 per cent of global GDP—into the legal economy, so countries like Afghanistan and Colombia can reclaim their territory from armed gangs. But that is a goal that requires vast political change within the country driving global prohibition, the US. It will come—if at all—too late for Afghanistan.
So the Senlis Council has come up with a sensible short-term solution. It is simple: in an Afghan equivalent to the EU's common agricultural policy, instead of destroying Afghanistan's opium crop, our governments should simply buy it, and sell it on to produce legal opiate-based painkillers. Instead of approaching Afghan farmers with weapons, our representatives would be approaching them with cash.
This can be done easily, even within the current structure of global prohibition. In the early 1970s, the Nixon administration began to demand that the opium farmers of southern Turkey destroy their crops. Every programme of destruction—carried out by reluctant Turkish prime ministers coerced with threats of cuts in US military aid—failed. Eventually, Turkey was considered to be such a crucial cold-war ally that the US agreed that it could be an exception. Turkey joined India as a legal supplier of opiates for pain-control purposes, and remains so today. The US department of agriculture operates according to the "80-20 rule"—80 per cent of US opium is purchased from two supplier countries, while the remaining 20 per cent come from the rest of the world.
Isn't Afghanistan even more important today than Turkey was in the 1970s? If Tony Blair wants at least one of his liberations to work, he should ask a final favour of George W Bush— a former recreational drug user himself—to extend the list of countries licensed to grow opiates to the high hills of Tora Bora, and plead for a global Afghan brand of opiates for every hospital. It is a strange truth that if Blair really wants to live up to his commitment to save Afghanistan, he should bow out by orchestrating the biggest heroin deal in history.
