Legal Opiates: Regulation Not War
The LA Times runs a story “Make a Drug Deal with Afghanistan” that actually suggests a solution to several problems: the ineffectiveness of the war on drugs, along with help for those suffering from chronic pain. (Read this link for more serious discussion about “High Dosage Opioid Management: Considerations in Treating Intractable Pain”.)
The article references an independent Brussels-based think tank that found the drop in Afghani support for the U.S. was directly linked to its program of destroying poppy crops.
Perhaps the deliberate destruction of up to 60% of the Afghan’s potential economy could be justified, if opiates weren’t a necessary part of modern medicines pain management systems, however, as the article points out:
The world is suffering from a shortage of legal opiates. The World Health Organization describes it as "an unprecedented global pain crisis." About 80% of the world's population has almost no access to these painkillers at all. Even in developed countries, for cancer care alone there is an unmet annual need for 550 metric tons more opium to make morphine.
Afghan farmers continue to produce the stuff, only to be made into criminals because of it. Meanwhile, in a Kabul hospital, half the patients who need opiates are thrashing about in agony because they can't get them, while in fields only a few miles away opium crops are being hacked to pieces.
The solution is simple. Instead of destroying Afghanistan's most valuable resource, Western governments should buy it outright and resell it to producers of legal opiate-based painkillers on the global market. Instead of confronting Afghan farmers about their crop, our representatives should be approaching them with hard cash.
This has been successfully tried before. In the early 1970s, the Nixon administration began to demand that the opium farmers of southern Turkey destroy their crops. Every attempt at destruction — carried out by reluctant Turkish prime ministers coerced with threats of cuts in U.S. military aid — failed. Eventually, Turkey was considered to be such a crucial Cold War ally that the U.S. granted it an exception. So Turkey joined India as a legal supplier of opiates for pain-control purposes, and it remains so today. Isn't Afghanistan even more important today than Turkey was in the 1970s?
Making Afghanistan a legal supplier of opiates for pain control purposes…two birds with one stone?
