The illegal drug trade, estimated by the UN at $2.7-billion per year and constituting more than one-third of Afghanistan's gross domestic product, threatens to drive the country inexorably from a narco-economy to a narco-state. In the narco-state, power will have moved from elected leaders to drug lords and their Taliban allies. This will spell death for democracy.

There is no disagreement about this. The disagreement has to do with the best means of solving the problem. The current policy of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United States seeks to destroy poppy crops and punish the farmers.

The Senlis Council (in co-operation with specialists in opiates and their regulation, working at the Universities of Calgary and Toronto) offers an alternative aimed at legalized, regulated poppy production in Afghanistan to supply the developing world with needed painkillers.

(By 2015, the World Health Organization estimates there will be 10 million cancer cases per year in the developing countries, in addition to the millions of cases of HIV/AIDS. The WHO describes the expected demand for opium-based medicines as a “world pain crisis.”)

Traffic in morphine and codeine is licensed by the International Narcotics Control Board. The INCB points out that the richest nations (the United States, United Kingdom, France, Japan, Germany, Australia and Canada) consume nearly all of the world's opiates, leaving 80 per cent of the globe's population virtually without.

Could opiates made from Afghan poppies make up the shortfall, if the INCB were to license growing there, as it does in France, India and Turkey? Undoubtedly. Meeting the global demand for pain medication has been estimated to require about double the current Afghan production. Maia Szalavitz, a senior fellow at Stats, a media watchdog group, has estimated the cost of buying the entire Afghan poppy crop at the current market price, set today by Afghan drug lords, as about $600-million — less than the $780-million the United States budgeted last year for eradication.

1. How much poppy does the pharmaceutical industry need?

2. Who are the extant legit poppy suppliers? How do they feel about competition?

3. Is the transport infrastructure in place to move the harvested crop to medical refineries?

4. What other roadblocks are there?

There would be some cognitive dissonance between legalizing the Afghan drug trade and the continued U.S. war in Columbia and Bolivia that is billed as the fight against drugs. Not that recognizing rank hypocrisy ever stopped the use of force, but doing anything that starts a discussion of the wisdom of drug eradication opens the way for some bad public relations.

There is another component to this particular puzzle and it involves the fact that a good portion of the opium from Afghanistan passes through Russia where it helps support a not insignificant part of the Russian General Staff. There was a long article on this - I am not in a place where I can do research but I'm sure someone can easily find it.

There would apparently be not inconsiderable disruption in the Russian military were we to stop the illegal trade which they would undoubtedly be inclined to take out on us either through support of Afghan insurgents who may not like the Russians but would be happy to take whatever help they can get against us or some other nefarious way.

Not surprisingly, few people factor in the world-wide drug black market into the events of what's going down in the so-called "War on Terror", whether it's rogue(?) CIA sponsered cocaine coming into Jeb Bush's black-hole of organized crime ridden Florida or the resurgance of the opium trade after the "failed" erradication of the Taliban in Afghanistan. That the global "illegal" drug trade funds not only American, but Russian black operations is well documented history. Legally growing opium poppies on such a large scale would have to be subjected to stringent auditing, which of course, just would not be allowed to happen; to think otherwise is naive. Too many people in political power make too much money from illegal activities such as the drug and arms and sex trade as we well know when occasionally their activities come to light.

It escapes most Americans that their military does not exist to keep them or their country safe; it is merely a tool of the corporate government to protect it's overseas assets... whether they be the oil-fields or the poppy fields.

The CIA needs it's funding mechanism back, that's 50% of why we went there in the first place.