U.N. SAYS TALIBAN WIPED OUT OPIUM THAT SUPPLIED BULK OF WORLD'S HEROIN

JALALABAD, Afghanistan -- U.N. drug-control officers said the Taliban
religious militia has virtually wiped out opium production in Afghanistan
- -- once the world's largest producer -- since banning poppy cultivation in
July.

A 12-member team from the U.N. Drug Control Program spent two weeks
searching most of the nation's largest opium-producing areas and found so
few poppies that they do not expect any opium to come out of Afghanistan
this year.

``We are not just guessing. We have seen the proof in the fields,'' said
Bernard Frahi, regional director for the U.N. program in Afghanistan and
Pakistan. He laid out photographs of vast tracts of land cultivated with
wheat alongside pictures of the same fields taken a year earlier -- a sea
of blood-red poppies.

A State Department official said Thursday that all the information the
United States had received so far indicated the poppy crop had decreased,
but he did not believe that it was eliminated.

Last year, Afghanistan produced nearly 4,000 tons of opium, about 75
percent of the world's supply, U.N. officials said. Opium -- the milky
substance drained from the poppy plant -- is converted into heroin and sold
in Europe and North America. The 2000 output was a world record for opium
production, the United Nations said -- more than all other countries
combined, including the ``Golden Triangle,'' where the borders of Thailand,
Laos and Burma meet.

Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader, banned poppy growing
before the November planting season and augmented it with a religious edict
making it contrary to the tenets of Islam.

The Taliban, which has imposed a strict interpretation of Islam in the 95
percent of Afghanistan it controls, has set fire to heroin laboratories and
jailed farmers until they agreed to destroy their poppy crops.

The ban has badly hurt farmers in one of the world's poorest countries,
shattered by two decades of war and devastated by drought. Shams-ul-Haq
Sayed, an officer of the Taliban drug-control office in Jalalabad, said
farmers need international aid to recover from the loss of their
traditional income.

Western diplomats in Pakistan have suggested the Taliban has stockpiled
opium and is trying to drive up the price of the drug. Frahi dismissed that
view as ``nonsense.''

Two pounds of opium worth $35 last year are now worth as much as $360, he said.