Afghan Opium Policy

“Once we thought terrorism was Afghanistan’s biggest enemy [but now the] poppy, its cultivation and drugs are Afghanistan’s major enemy”
–Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan

In 2007 Afghanistan's poppies produced 8,200 tons, or 93% of the world's opium (United Nations). The United States and NATO have waged a long and dirty war on Afghanistan's poppy crop since their occupation of the country in 2001. The eradication of these poppy crops has become a primary objective of the Western powers operating in Afghanistan, spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a smorgasbord of programs, from drug-education in schools to the bulldozing of crops. Despite this, there are 193,000 hectares, or nearly half a million acres, of opium poppies cultivated in Afghanistan, according to a 2007 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report. Afghanistan is the world’s largest producer of illicit narcotics, surpassing the entire relative coca production of all of Latin America. Its exports of the drug constitute more than half of the country's GDP.

The reality of the situation on the ground in Afghanistan is incompatible with the directives coming from the US and NATO. We are at an impasse: the insurgent Taliban lean heavily on illicit poppy crops to finance themselves, and the destruction of farmers’ poppies only turns the populace against the Afghan government and against the United States. General James Jones, the Supreme Commander of NATO and incoming National Security Advisor, has labeled opium “the Achilles’ Heel of Afghanistan” (DeYoung). If President-Elect Obama is serious about winning in Afghanistan, a dramatically modified strategy to combat opium production must play a central role in forging the road ahead. We can learn from the model of what was done in Turkey in the 1970’s. Instead of pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into futile and fruitless crop destruction, the United States should work with Afghan farmers and create a framework through which to purchase opium crops for use in legitimate painkillers, such as morphine and codeine.

History

Poppies have been cultivated and opium isolated from them since around 3400 BCE in Sumeria, where opium was known as gil, meaning “joy”, and the plant as hul gil, meaning “plant of joy.” Opium’s recorded use as a painkiller goes back just as far, to at least 1500 BCE when it was recommended in the Ebers Papyrus as a method to stop the “excessive crying of children.” Arab traders had brought opium to India and China by the 8th century CE, and the drug had reached all parts of Europe by the 12th century (Brownstein). It was described in highly influential treatises by the 10th century Andalusian physician, Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawihe, considered the father of modern surgery, as the most effective surgical anesthetic known to man (Opium). Sponges soaked in opium, known as spongia somnifera, or “soporific sponges” were used as anesthesia during medieval and pre-modern surgeries (Brownstein). The 14th century Ottoman physician Şerafeddin Sabuncuoğlu promoted opium for treatment of such painful ailments as migraines and sciatica (Opium).

The first obvious reference to the recreational use of opium comes 1483, when Chinese courtier Xu Boling wrote that it was "mainly used to aid masculinity, strengthen sperm and regain vigor” and goes on to say that it “enhances the art of alchemists, sex and court ladies" (Opium). Opium’s potential for abuse and addiction first became patent in the 17th century, when widespread addiction to madak (a smokeable blend of opium and tobacco) spread through China. Engelbert Kaempfer, a German traveler and naturalist, writing in 1712 described madak’s addictive properties: "No commodity throughout the Indies is retailed with greater profit…than opium, which [its] users cannot do without, nor can they come by it except it be brought by the ships of the Batavians from Bengal and Coromandel” (Opium). The British East India Company’s monopoly on opium imports into China led to two wars between China and the United Kingdom, in 1840 and 1858. The First Opium War was caused when Chinese authorities seized 20,000 chests of the drug from British traders and burned them. This represented a loss of more than $20,000,000 in current values, and the British reacted by attacking and sinking the Southern Chinese Fleet, and taking control of Hong Kong and other trade concessions (Opium). The Second Opium War ended with Britain forcing China to legalize the growth and production of opium. By 1906 China produced around 85% of the world’s opium and 27% of the adult male population, some 13.5 million people, were addicted to the drug, consuming 39,000 tons every year (Opium). The highly addictive nature of opium resulted in it becoming one of the first substances to be controlled in the United States. San Francisco forced the closure of the city’s opium dens in 1875. The United States government banned imports of the drug in 1909, though it could still be obtained for medical reasons until 1924 (Opium).

Biology and Drug Development

The opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) is native to Western Asia and Southeast Europe, but now grows over much of the world. The active narcotic elements of the opium poppy are located in the poppy’s seedpods, which are scored with a knife while still unripe, causing the pod to “bleed” a milky white latex. The latex dries into a sticky brown resin overnight, and is then collected the next morning. One acre of poppies harvested in this way produces between three and five kilograms of raw opium. Narcotic content of the latex differs between different varieties of poppies. For example, one of the most potent strains, Papaver somniferum L. elite, contains nearly 92% morphine, codeine, and thebaine, while “Marianne,” the variety often used for poppy seed production, has less than one fifth of that content (Opium).

In 1806 the German pharmacist Friedrich Sertürner isolated opium’s active component, and named it Morphine after Morpheus, the god of dreams. Twenty years later another active ingredient was isolated, and named Codeine. Almost immediately, morphine began to be used in place of opium in minor surgical procedures and for treatment of chronic pain (Brownstein). In 1874 an English chemist named C.R. Alder White synthesized heroin by adding an acetyl functional group to morphine through a process of boiling together anhydrous morphine alkaloid and acetic anhydride over a stove (Heroin). White never did anything with this new relative of morphine, and it was not until 1896 that Felix Hoffmann, working for Bayer Pharmaceuticals in Germany, re-synthesized heroin, and it began to be sold as a cough suppressant and, ironically, as a cure for morphine addiction (Heroin).

Opium Production in Afghanistan

The 2006 opium crop, 30% smaller than the 2007 crop previously cited, was the largest single narcotic crop in history (Schweich). Following his tour of duty, Thomas Schweich, the American Ambassador for Counternarcotics and Justice Reform in Afghanistan, wrote a lengthy article in the New York Times Magazine in which he dubbed Afghanistan a “Narco-State” and related in detail the frustrating two years he spent trying to eradicate poppy crops. Afghan officials, including President Hamid Karzai, Schweich claims, have a vested interest in making sure nothing disrupts the country’s illegal opium trade. Not only would the country lose half of its GDP if the trade were put to an end, but many officials, and their relatives, are intimately involved in the drug trade itself. Afghanistan’s Attorney General told Schweich that President Karzai had personally directed him not to prosecute anyone on his list of twenty names of high-profile officials involved in the opium business. (Schweich). Schweich describes how he went to the Afghan ministries to recommend aerial eradication as the cheapest and most effective way to combat rising opium production, and was flat out refused.

The opium trade is not only associated with the Afghan government, but is also closely connected to the insurgent Taliban forces. Antonio Maria Costa, the Executive Director of UNODC, in describing the sharp rise in poppy cultivation in Afghanistan’s southern provinces declared “a very strong connection between the increase in the insurgency on the one hand and the increase in cultivation on the other hand” (Gall). Opium is the linchpin connecting an extensive network of drug traffickers, insurgents, terrorists, corrupt government officials, and tens of thousands of farmers simply trying to make ends meet. As Costa wrote in a 2007 editorial in the Washington Post:
Drug traffickers have a symbiotic relationship with insurgents and terrorist groups such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda...Opium is the glue that holds this murky relationship together. If profits fall, these sinister forces have the most to lose. I suspect that the big traffickers are hoarding surplus opium as a hedge against future price shocks and as a source of funding for future terrorist attacks, in Afghanistan or elsewhere…Instability makes opium cultivation possible; opium buys protection and pays for weapons and foot soldiers, and these in turn create an environment in which drug lords, insurgents and terrorists can operate with impunity (Costa).

“The Turkish Strategy”

In the 1960’s Turkey was the fountainhead of most of the world’s opium, supplying around 80% of the heroin in the United States (Hurst). In 1969, President Richard Nixon, newly elected in part because of campaign promises to pursue a “war on drugs,” contacted the Turkish government and told them that poppy criminalization and eradication in Turkey was a top American priority. He suggested that the United States could fund programs for reimbursing farmers for the crops they destroyed, and that if poppies were not criminalized, Turkey could jeopardize the more than $60 million in American aid it received every year. But as in Afghanistan, the poppy was culturally and economically entrenched, having been grown on the plains of Anatolia for millennia. There were more than 70,000 poppy-farming families in the country. The Turkish Prime Minister, Suleyman Demirel, replied that it would be “impossible to go to farmers and ask them to plow under their crops. We cannot control it. The poppies will just appear illegally” and that imposing a program of eradication would “bring down the government” (Hurst). In 1974, the next Prime Minister, breaking the impasse, asked the United Nations for help in building a poppy processing plant and introducing a system for monitoring and regulating drug production. Today, 600,000 Turks are employed in a “highly regulated” system through which Turkey provides medical-grade morphine and codeine to the West, with “negligible” diversion to the illegal market (Hurst).

Opponents of launching a similar “Turkish Strategy” in Afghanistan assert that Afghanistan does not have the necessary stability and government oversight to effectively regulate a legal poppy licensing system. The US Bureau of International Narcotics contends, reasonably, that “without safeguards, licit and illicit opium would be indistinguishable. Opium really destined for the black market would be produced under the pretense of a legal system” (Hurst). Though Afghanistan cannot be expected to live up to the same kind of stringent and effectual verification as Turkey, is it not better to have 20 or 30 percent of the crop diverted to illegal trade than the current 100 percent?

It has also been argued that there is simply no legitimate market capable of handling the massive amounts of opium produced in Afghanistan every month. This is patently false. Figures from the International Narcotics Control Board, which regulates all legal international trade in narcotics, show that seven Western countries account for nearly 80% of the global consumption of morphine; developing countries, with 80% of the world’s population account for only 6% of morphine use (Hurst). Turkey and India (which also has a legal trade in opium products) contend that if Afghanistan is allowed into their market, that the levels of drugs diverted to illegal trade will rise, but Costa claims that the Afghan supply alone already exceeds global demand by 30%, and that Afghan drug lords are sitting on their supplies in order to drive up prices (Costa). While demand for basic painkilling medications might be met in the United States and other Western countries, there is a dramatic dearth in supply for Third World demand. The United States could dedicate some of the $500 million it has allocated each year to Afghan counternarcotics to buying up Afghan supplies and supplying painkillers to developing countries at affordable prices.

Conclusion

A change in administrations, coupled with President-Elect Obama’s repeated vows in the campaign to refocus American attention on the war in Afghanistan, make this a moment of enormous potential to finally break the status quo of the feeble and ineffectual American drug policy in Afghanistan. In one fell swoop we have the ability to help Afghan farmers, reduce the global share of illegal opium-based drugs like heroin, cut off funding to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and court international goodwill by providing much-needed medicines to the developing world. It would be an act of criminal foolishness to blindly follow old policies that have been proven as failures when Turkey has already proven the efficacy of its legal poppy licensing system.