PAIN RELIEF FOR AFGHANISTAN

Using Afghan opium poppies for legal medicines is an interesting idea
- -- but it would require real security

The rather recently arrived, but amply funded, Senlis Council has
released the latest of its broadsides, promoting its "Poppy for
Medicine" project, while at the same time slagging Canadian diplomacy
in Afghanistan.

The striped-pants set probably shouldn't get their knickers in a knot
though, since Senlis's treatment of CIDA and UNICEF was even more savage.

In fact, a fast tour through the reported e-mail exchanges between the
Senlis field wallahs in Afghanistan and the local offices of CIDA and
UNICEF suggests it's unlikely that anybody in Senlis has ever read
Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends & Influence People.

That may be a pity, for the key elements of the Senlis Council's
proposal for a pilot project to test the feasibility of "Poppy for
Medicine" may actually be worth a look.

In a nutshell, Senlis proposes that small groups of Afghan villages be
granted the authority to grow opium poppy for conversion locally into
medical opiates for export to satisfy Third-World requirements for
medical pain relief.

Technologically feasible? Maybe.

A recent study for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
(UNODC), titled "Documentation of a heroin manufacturing process in
Afghanistan," records the steps by which "white heroin hydrochloride
(is) produced using simple equipment and a small quantity of chemicals."

Setting aside for a moment questions of purity and quality control,
and economics, one is left with the implicit premise that if
criminal-grade heroin can be produced locally, why not try a pilot
project to see if it might be possible to produce medical grade
morphine, or codeine, or other medical opiates.

However, an overarching concern of such bodies as UNODC and the
International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), which are tasked to
oversee the administration of the 1961 United Nations Single
Convention on Narcotic Drugs and its follow-on conventions, is the
potential for diversion of medical opiates into the criminal drug
distribution networks.

Thus, the existing small poppy producer programs in Turkey and India,
authorized by the INCB to grow poppy for the production of medical
opiates, depend heavily on close supervision of the farmers by Turkish
and Indian government agencies who buy the crop, backed up by the
honest and sternly reliable Turkish and Indian armies.

So, how does Senlis propose to achieve a Turkish/Indian level of
control of licensed poppy production in order to avoid diversion into
the criminal stream?

Senlis makes a unique proposal to rely, not on the Afghan National
Army (or especially the Afghan National Police) but rather upon the
traditional Afghan social control structures to be found in the
village shuras -- described by Senlis as "community-level governance
structures which strictly enforce social norms and behaviour at all
levels of social and economic interaction in rural Afghan communities,
through the principle of collective responsibility."

However, the "correlation of forces" (to use that old but useful Cold
War term) between the criminal drug traders on the one hand, and the
village elders of the shuras on the other, seems rather similar to the
"facts on the ground" of Al Capone's South Side in the Chicago of the
1920s, with the key difference being the substitution of the
ubiquitous AK-47 for the equally ubiquitous Thompson sub-machine gun
- -- the "Chicago Piano" so favoured by Capone and his mob.

Thus, without the firepower of the Canadian Battle Group to protect
it, the "Poppy for Medicine" pilot project in Kandahar won't get off
the ground.

It isn't surprising, therefore, that Senlis argues that the Canadians
must remain in Kandahar past the end of the current mission in 2009.

Senlis president, Canadian lawyer Norine MacDonald, on the Sept. 24
release of their new study, "The Canadian Government Must Develop Fast
Track Approach to Peace in Afghanistan," put it bluntly:

"We have to stay until the job is done. To leave before we have
brought peace to the people of Afghanistan not only endangers Canada's
own security for generations to come, it would be throwing away the
commitment of resources and sacrifices -- including lives -- that we
have made in Afghanistan. Pulling out before achieving victory is
tantamount to giving Southern Afghanistan back to the Taliban and al-Qaeda."

"Poppy for Medicine" as a joint project of Senlis and the Canadian
Provincial Reconstruction Team in Kandahar, protected by the Canadian
Battle Group in Kandahar post 2009?

Worth a look, maybe?

Maybe.