LEGALIZE AFGHAN OPIUM: REPORT

An international marketing board for opium, similar to Canada's wheat
board, would better fight terrorism and the booming drug trade in
Afghanistan instead of current efforts to eradicate the poppy, a
former Canadian envoy says.

Destroying poppy crops, a major plank of American and British
anti-drug policy, only drives farmers toward the Taliban, said Gordon
Smith, Canada's NATO ambassador between 1985 and 1990. He's the lead
author of a report released Thursday that urges the continuation of
Canada's military presence beyond the current 2009 deadline, but also
says current NATO policies need a shakeup.

His study, prepared for the Calgary-based Canadian Defence and
Foreign Affairs Institute, urged the creation of an international
clearinghouse to buy opium crops and prevent money from entering the
hands of Taliban insurgents or traffickers.

Afghanistan remains the largest heroin producing and trafficking
country, producing more than 90 per cent of the world's opium poppy
supply in 2006. That's 172,000 hectares, according to recent U.S.
estimates -- a 61 per cent jump from the previous year. Opium exports
account for one-third of the country's combined licit and illicit
GDP, according to the United Nations.

"In a perfect world, nobody would be allowed to grow poppies and all
would be well," Smith said. "It would never be leak-proof. It's not a
frightfully good option, but it's better than any others that anyone
else has come forward with."

Fair opium prices and central regulation by the Afghan government and
foreign states would also help alleviate international morphine
shortages, said Smith, a former deputy minister of foreign affairs
and now executive director of the University of Victoria's Centre for
Global Studies.

Poppy cultivation remains the only lucrative career choice for many
impoverished Afghans, living under the burden of three continuous
decades of civil war.

But strong links exist between Afghanistan's burgeoning narco-economy
and the Taliban insurgence against NATO and Afghan forces, according
to a U.S. State Department report also released Thursday.

"Traffickers provide weapons, funding and personnel to the Taliban in
exchange for the production of drug trade routes, poppy fields, and
members of their organizations," the report said.

Barnett Rubin, a former UN adviser on Afghanistan, argued in 2003
that the marketing board idea would represent disaster for small
Afghan farmers, keeping prices low along the lines of African coffee,
tea and cocoa boards. An auction house in Kabul, with sales taxed by
the central government, was a better idea, said Rubin, a New York
University professor.

Smith said Thursday his group has no specific plan to set up an opium
marketing board.