A heavy duty Colombian trafficker I met suggested the same thing concerning coca leaf. It's not that he wanted to see this done, just that he thought it would work. The amount of money that the peons get for the base material is miniscule compared to the value of the refined drugs.

The money it would take to buy the world supply is a tiny fraction of our anti-drug budget.

I'd have an additional point for number 5. A lot of that money gets into the hands of evil people in Western governments funding black ops as well.

In fact, every dollar spent on drugs finds its way back into the "legitimate" economy at some point to be of any use.

Look long enough at the War on Drugs and you might decide it's a war our government doesn't want to win.

I did inhale.

There's a lot of money in American agricultural policies, promoted as helping farmers. In fact, the money goes to agribusiness. In addition to the entrenched interests of the Drug War, there's also I think a reluctance to follow a policy anywhere that actually helps farmers, since it would call into question the legitimacy of the structure of American agricultural supports.

only one thing to add. it's nice to believe, as i do, that we'll see reasoned and sensible drug policy in my lifetime. what a change that will be, in so many ways.

As Mark Bowden states in his book A Shadow in the City, opiate addiction is for life. In some fashion a person will be dealing with the dangers of scoring, cleaning up, the law, loss of family, fighting addiction tendencies, etc etc. A person can do smack indefinitely, physiologically heroin itself is benign, but you can overdose and stop your breathing, or heart from the sedative effects. More that likely infection or getting hurt scoring will do you in. The point being made here is that heroin addiction can go on for a life time; people do not deteriorate physiologically as methamphetamine will ravage and decimate.

Of course, the U.S. and British policies will increase the flow of smack. There is no hope of a sane policy of attempting to reduce the hazards to citizens, or the supplier countries.

Here is the counter augment to buying the crop up. Same old argument, if you buy it legally then the price will go up and more production will occur.

Guardian

Senior Nato official
Nato, under pressure to take a more aggressive role, says publicly that its Isaf mission in Afghanistan does not include counter-narcotics but operates in support of the Afghan government. Alliance sources privately blame widespread corruption for hobbling Kabul's efforts. But the key, they insist, is security.
"The more lawless the area the bigger the drug production, so though we've had an explosion of poppy production in Helmand, the more orderly areas are now producing less," says one senior figure. "If you can bring law and order poppy is a problem you can start to grapple with. The Senlis argument that if you buy up the crop everything will be OK is misleading. The crop in Helmand has already quadrupled in a few years. If poppy becomes legal then people will stop growing other crops and start to grow poppy instead. Also illegal poppy is always going to sell for more than a legal crop. And anyway, why would the Taliban let people switch? This is about power and control: you are challenging their authority in another way. They'll tell the farmers: sell poppy to the government and we'll kill you or rape your daughters; sell to us and we won't."

With all this new production there has to be a tidal wave of smack hitting European and North American markets. With a economic depression looming the saying may become "hey buddy can you spare a dime bag"

"There are two types of folk music:
quiet folk music and loud folk music.
I play both."

Dave Alvin

This reminds me of a documentary I saw on PBS called Black Gold (http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blackgold/). It is about the coffee trade. The entire show is interesting but the relevant part to this topic is the crops that farmers in Ethiopia decide to grow. Ethiopian coffee is considered one of the best in the world. However, because the farmers were getting paid so little for their coffee they started using their land to grow a drug that locals like (I think it was an opiate, but I'm not certain). The farmers could sell the drug for more money and then buy clothes for their children and send them to school.

The documentary follows farmers that have joined Fair Trade co-operatives so that they can cut out a big chain of middle-men in getting their coffee to the roasters. The end result is these farmers get more money for growing coffee than they do for growing drugs and so the choice is easy for them. They grow coffee (make more money).

It's amazing to me that our leaders so often try to set policy in altruistic terms (good vs evil, drugs are bad) than in practical ones (people want food, shelter, clothing, education, to see their children better off than they are). In many things there are simple solutions.

Thomas