RUSS CARNAHAN BACKS MORPHINE-FREE POPPY TO COUNTER
AFGHAN HEROIN BOOM

WASHINGTON - After a year of escalating Afghan heroin production,
calls are mounting for a shift in U.S. policy aimed at turning
Afghanistan's poppy into an economic asset by using it to produce
medicinal painkillers.

Backers of the proposal include several leading scientists and
economists, as well as some in Congress. The Bush administration is
skeptical.

Rep. Russ Carnahan, D-St. Louis, plans to use his recently acquired
seat on the House International Relations Committee to bring up the
matter when lawmakers convene next month.

"You can't just cut off the poppies because that's the livelihood of
the people who live there," Carnahan said Thursday. "But providing
them with alternative legal markets for pain-relief medication is a
way to help cut back on that heroin supply."

Carnahan hopes to drive these points home by using testimony from law
enforcement officers, drug abuse experts and scientists from St.
Louis, where officials say an influx of Afghan heroin is causing problems.

"We need to have a better way of dealing with the problem, since it's
proving to be so deadly here in St. Louis and in the Midwest," he said.

In backing the idea, Carnahan and others cite its success
elsewhere.

Thirty years ago, U.S. officials fashioned a treaty that turned a
looming narcotics threat in Turkey and India into a part of their
legitimate economies using poppies to make legal medication. Those
nations export raw opiates from which painkillers are produced by
companies such as Mallinckrodt of St. Louis.

Australia has a thriving trade from altered, morphine-free poppies
that cannot easily be used to produce heroin. The painkillers derived
from a compound it produces, called thebaine, are potent and in demand
throughout much of the world.

Administration skeptical

Congressional frustration has grown as Afghanistan's illicit poppy
cultivation, which has exploded since the U.S. invasion, has jumped 60
percent during the past year. It now produces 90 percent of the
world's heroin, while helping fund the Taliban insurgency.

But the administration sees problems with a proposal to produce legal
poppies.

Tom Schweich, a senior State Department official who is spearheading
U.S. efforts to curb Afghan narcotics, said he welcomed "creative
ideas" but found this one to be unrealistic.

He said Afghan farmers wouldn't have enough economic incentive to turn
away from illegal poppy cultivation. He added that Afghanistan lacks
the required business infrastructure for processing, manufacturing and
distribution, and that the oversight needed to prevent illicit drug
trafficking would be near impossible.

"You really need to keep it illegal and eradicate it," Schweich
said.

James O'Gara, deputy director for supply reduction at the White House
Office of National Drug Control Policy, added that Afghan poppy is so
bountiful that it could be "out of whack" with what is needed for the
medicinal market.

Beyond those concerns, there also would be agricultural challenges in
implementing such a program, as well as likely opposition from nations
now reaping profits from the legal poppy trade.

Afghan heroin in St. Louis

The Post-Dispatch reported in May that police and health officials in
Missouri and Illinois were noting increased arrests, seizures of
contraband and drug overdoses related to Afghan heroin. This week, law
enforcement officials in Orange County, Calif., said a sharp rise in
Afghan heroin is the top drug problem they face.

Carnahan's involvement stems in part from a meeting his staff recently
had with Percy Menzies, who runs an addiction recovery center in St.
Louis, and Dan Duncan, of the St. Louis chapter of the National
Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse.

"The amount of middle-class people using heroin in the St. Louis area
the last couple of years just horrifies me," Duncan said. "It's long
past time we take a good hard look at some new strategies."

Menzies, president of Assisted Recovery Centers in St. Louis, spent 18
years at Dupont Pharmaceuticals, where he worked with poppy-derived
substances to treat heroin addiction and helped establish treatment
centers in five states.

"For the first time, we have more people addicted to heroin than
alcohol in my clinic, and these are suburban kids from St. Louis
County. More and more Afghan heroin is coming in," Menzies said.

Opium replaces money

Vanda Faber-Brown is an expert in the role of narcotics in illicit
economics and military conflicts. Faber-Brown, who works at Harvard
University and the Brookings Institution, said convincing Afghan
farmers to change their brand of poppy would be easier than trying to
wipe out poppy fields altogether, destroying their livelihood.

"Essentially, opium has replaced money in key day-to-day activities in
the countryside," Faber-Brown said. Poppy's domination of
Afghanistan's economy - about 30 percent of economic activity - dwarfs
anything previously seen in Colombia, Bolivia or Burma, she said.

Biochemist Toni Kutchan leads an internationally renowned research
team on medicinal plants, including poppy, at the Donald Danforth
Plant Science Center in St. Louis. She spent two decades in Germany,
where she also headed research teams in plant biochemistry.

"The idea of creating a trade for morphine-free opium is very
worthwhile and needs to be thought through carefully," she said. "It
should not be pushed off the table by a knee-jerk reaction against
it."

The Australian poppy plants are an easily achieved mutant, but there
could be a legal issue of patents, Kutchan said. If that posed
problems because the Australians did not want to share the plants, the
same ones could be created by genetic modification, albeit with more
difficulty, she said.

A related option is to bring Afghanistan into a 1970s treaty, reached
with U.S. prompting, that allows Turkey and India to keep growing
poppies as long as the opium produced is sold to companies that make
legal painkillers. Experts say that while this wouldn't require
changing the type of poppies in Afghanistan, the strict regulation
needed could be a problem, given Afghanistan's ineffective government.

Call for change

The search for a new approach is largely prompted by the failure of
current U.S. policies to stem Afghan poppy production.

James Dobbins, who was President George W. Bush's first special envoy
to Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, said proposals
for a morphine-free poppy should be closely examined.

"I'd certainly like to see a study on how feasible that is," said
Dobbins, who now directs the International Security and Defense Policy
Center at the RAND Corp. "I do think that the current U.S. and
international effort is at best a kind of a Band-Aid that can't have
more than a marginal impact."

Dr. Charles Schuster headed the National Institute on Drug Abuse under
Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush and is now director of the
Neuroscience Institute at Loyola University in Chicago.

"I think the government should give serious consideration to
attempting to implement that type of program," he said, adding that
current U.S. policies alone "are never going to be the solution for
this."