A TALIBAN WEAPON: HEROIN

U.S officials are worried that Afghanistan's ruling Taliban regime will
unleash a vast stockpile of opium on the world market in the wake of the
U.S.-led attacks.

American intelligence agencies estimate the Taliban has stockpiled more
than 800 tons of opium over the last five years. Afghanistan emerged as the
world's largest producer of the illicit drug in 1999, replacing Burma's
"Golden Triangle" region.

The Drug Enforcement Administration says 5 percent of opium consumed by
heroin addicts in the United States comes from Afghanistan. Most heroin now
sold on American streets comes from "black tar" opium grown in Mexico and
Colombia.

Although the Taliban last year launched a high-profile public-relations
campaign vowing to wipe out the poppy fields, the State Department has
repeatedly accused the fundamentalist regime of stockpiling opium rather
than destroying it in order to boost world prices.

William Bach, director of the Asian office of the State Department's Bureau
of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, said the Taliban
has "condoned and profited from the drug trade," imposing a 10 percent tax
on producers and traffickers to raise money to buy arms.

Bach said there is evidence the Taliban also has developed laboratories to
turn opium into the more lucrative heroin to maximize profits. A 1999
United Nations report indicated the drug trade produced $40 million for
Taliban militants that year.

A U.N. report earlier this year said that while the Taliban's supreme
spiritual leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, announced a ban on poppy production
in July 1999, that directive was applied only to regions outside of direct
Taliban control, so the Taliban was free to keep producing the drug itself.

Some reports from the region say that even that directive was lifted Sept.
2 - nine days before the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and
Pentagon - when the Taliban-owned Voice of Shariat announced the ban on
poppy production was rescinded.

Asa Hutchinson, administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, told
the House Government Reform Committee last week that his agency has no
direct evidence that Osama bin Laden is directly involved in the drug
trade. But Hutchinson said there's no doubt the drug trade is financing the
Taliban. "This connection defines the deadly symbiotic relationship between
the illegal drug trade and international terrorism," he said.

Following last year's announced Taliban crackdown on opium production, the
price of opium increased from $44 a kilogram (2.2 pounds) to $400. But
after the U.S.-led attacks, the price declined to $95 a kilogram as
Hutchinson said opium wholesalers began dumping their supplies.