Just finished reading the International Narcotics Report released by the State Department today (2.29.08). I tell you, the Taliban got it going on and it seems to be all charged by the hate of US – the United States and the West. According to the report:"Narcotics production in Afghanistan hit historic highs in 2007 for the second straight year. Afghanistan grew 93 percent of the world’s opium poppy, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Opium poppy cultivation expanded from 165,000 ha in 2006 to 193,000 ha in 2007, an increase of 17 percent in land under cultivation... The export value of this year’s illicit opium harvest, $4 billion, made up more than a third of Afghanistan’s combined total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $11.5 billion. Afghanistan’s drug trade is undercutting efforts to establish a stable democracy with a licit economic free market in the country. The narcotics trade has strong links with the anti-government insurgency, most commonly associated with the Taliban. Narcotics traffickers provide revenue and arms to the Taliban, while the Taliban provides protection to growers and traffickers and keeps the government from interfering with their activities. During recent years, poppy production has soared in provinces where the Taliban is most active."
Now this tells me a few things. 1] the 32,000 troops we got in Afghanistan have not been able to reduce the opium trade nor convince farmers to stop growing Poppy in the region and 2] if they will blow up 2000 year old Buddhist statues out the side of mountian, they wont stop until they blow up all of our troops.
Now this means that the Taliban is rollin' in loot, 11.5 billion dollars worth. I know I would if i sold more than 90% of all the stuff that was the primary ingredient to make heroin. And I know, my senior chemistry seminar paper was how to make heroin #10 from Morphine (and i still got a copy, fol gave me an 89 n shit).
My main point of consternation is that the locations where cultivation of Poppy is the greatest is in areas that’s under the NATO forces’ control. LOL. So in essence, the Taliban is using this money to attack US and NATO forces as well as the U.S.-backed government. The report is called the U.S. State Department's annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Report. A Briefing on the report was given by Assistant Secretary David T. Johnson
We turned a blind eye to the plant when the Taliban was being funded and supplied by US when they were considered a way to make inroads into the country in 1979. But we can't blame them, because it easy money since i suspect that all the Taliban has to do is provide protection to growers and traffickers to collect. We supposedly reduced their power in 2001 but today still in 2008 we are locked in fierce battle with them folk.
All we do is talk about eradication of the plant when we know good and damn well that eradicating opium hurts already super, duper poor farmers. Meaning we talk about crop replacement but what crop gone replace the kind of loot that poppy can generate? Cocca or weed maybe, but not olive trees for sure. In 2003 it was estimated that poppy production according to the International Monetary Fund, accounted for 40 percent to 60 percent of the Afghan economy. So now I am speculating, since we have been there it now represents about 70 to 75% - is that an increase?
Here at home, heroin has made a combecak, albeit as LL Cool J said, "been here for years.". Based on data reported in the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, there are an estimated 3,091,000 U.S. individuals 12 years of age and older that have used heroin at least once. Now even kids are being hooked on the stuff. In Texas for example, there has recently become a large corpus of kids as young as 11 geting hoked on the stuff. Really they are becoming addicted to a mixture of heroin and Tylenol PM , commonly called "cheese." News Reports suggest that they buy it at school with their "lunch money and snorted it through hollowed-out ballpoint pens."
I guess this will be another legacy of G.W. Bush. I mean, we suposedly making progress at least in the strong hold of the Taliban. But what do they do, they take us down with one stone, growing poppy to supply their military wing, and get our youth, the future military persons of our country, addicited to the same shit.
