AFGHAN POPPY PRODUCTION FLOURISHES WITH TALIBAN GONE

Badullah Qoulf, Afghanistan - Juma Gul squats in the dirt and points to the
little green sprouts barely popping out of the earth, the poppy seedlings
that are going to save his family.

They don't look like much now, but in about five months, their pods will
burst with a milky white sap. The harvest will be refined into morphine,
then processed into heroin, smuggled, sold and shot into the bruised veins
of addicts around the world.

Poppy season is once again approaching in Afghanistan. Helmand province,
where the village of Badullah Qoulf is situated about 100 miles west of
Kandahar, is on its way to being the country's top producer again.

At least 200 people in this province, like Gul, are planting for the first
time in their lives and joining the rest of the poppy cultivators,
according to United Nations officials in the region.

The demise of the Taliban, the hard-line regime pushed out of power by
U.S.-led coalition forces, also meant the end of a ban on poppy
cultivation. The Taliban's prohibition, begun in 2000, resulted in a 96
percent drop in Afghanistan's production of raw opium, from more than 1
million pounds in 1999 to 40,600 pounds last year, according to the United
Nations Drug Control Program.

U.S. officials say their evidence suggests that the Taliban's ban was
created to drive up prices on the world market and that, despite the
prohibition, the Taliban, its al-Qaida allies and Afghanistan's economy
profited from opium production and sales of surpluses from earlier harvests.

Today, without a strong central government, the cultivation of poppies is a
free-for-all.

In January, the interim government of Hamid Karzai issued a decree
prohibiting poppy production and trafficking in narcotics, including opium
and heroin. But the new government is seen as too weak to enforce the ban.

"It would have been impossible to have grown poppies during the time of the
Taliban. I wouldn't have done it," said Gul, 30. "The new government has no
control. They have no army, no tanks. If they did, they would be able to
stop us, but they don't."

The governor of Helmand province, Haji Sher Muhammad Akhwanzada, said the
new government, still organizing itself, will in four or five months have
an army, and then some kind of force will be created to stop poppy production.

"The best way is negotiation. We'll first try to convince people to not
grow poppies, and then we'll provide alternative crops. If they don't stop,
then we'll use force," he said.

Muhammad Akbar, 32, a raw opium merchant in Kandahar, would welcome an
effort by Karzai's government and the international community to enforce a
ban on production.

For Akbar, the ban in 2000 meant that raw opium prices went from $100 a
kilogram to $1,533 a kilogram. He said he has cleared $100,000 in profits
in three years' work.

"The new government has announced this ban, but they can't implement it
because people have no other source of income," Akbar said. "Eighty percent
of Afghans are doing this business --- the cultivation, the transport, the
selling."

Leslie Oqvist, the United Nations regional coordination officer in Kandahar
for Afghanistan's southern region, recognizes that the priority for the new
government is to bring stability.

"Slowly but surely they will start to focus with the international
community to find alternative means of income for people," he said.

Farmer Gul says he will make about $9,000 raising poppies this season, 10
times what he could make with the crops he used to grow, such as wheat or
corn. Other growers say they make many times more.

Gul's father, Ghulam Sarwar, said the United States has to show how much it
wants poppy production to stop.

"What will the United States give us if we stop poppy production? We have
to have opium, and the United States has the dollars. Without paying us,
the Americans cannot stop us," he said.

Opium production has long been a staple of the Afghan economy, a trade that
the CIA helped to flourish, according to some.

In his book "The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug
Trade," author Alfred W. McCoy writes that in 1979 the CIA began supporting
anti-Soviet warlords who, in turn, used the agency's resources to expand
opium production.

The head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Asa Hutchinson, told
a House committee last fall that drug trafficking was a major source of
income for Afghanistan and the Taliban militia.

Hutchinson said the Taliban's July 2000 decree banning opium production
increased the market price but had no effect on availability. He suggested
that the Taliban was controlling a hoarded supply of opium to drive up the
price.

Afghanistan produced more than 70 percent of the world's opium supply in
2000, with most of that output being shipped to Europe, Hutchinson said.

Up and down the street in Kandahar where Akbar works are about 50 other
shops selling raw opium, each with about five or six traders. They buy from
the farmers and sell to those who will process the raw opium into heroin.

Akbar says relatively few Afghans suffer from heroin addiction. Still, he
recognizes that what he does is harmful to people.

"I don't tell my children what I do. I just say I'm a businessman," he
said. "I know I'm not doing a good thing, and I don't want my children to
know I'm selling poison."

As for Gul, he doesn't think much beyond the good money he'll be making
come June. The poppy farmer expresses a cold indifference when the
conversation turns to heroin addicts.

"When this drug arrives to the last person on the end of the line, that
person is finished," he said, chuckling. "The last man who gets this drug
is no more a son, no more a brother, no more a father."

It is only when he is shown a photo of an addict begging in the streets of
Quetta, Pakistan, that he is suddenly somber.

The addict is a man who identifies himself only as Muhammad. He spends his
time living under a bridge with other addicts in the center of the city or
begging for handouts. He carries the vacant look of a man who has no more
dreams.

About a 15-minute drive away are a few of the luckier ones. They are
addicts who have gone to the Milo Shaheed Trust, a drug treatment center in
eastern Quetta.

Akhtar Muhammad, 40, crouches in a corner with his shawl around his face.
He had been in treatment a week after 25 years as an addict. He didn't know
what heroin was when a friend got him some for 25 rupees, about 42 cents.

"I'm in a lot of pain. I didn't want to come here, but my elders made me do
it," he said. "If I hadn't, I'd be dead somewhere."

Drug abuse experts in Pakistan say the number of addicts has increased from
3.1 million in 1993 to as many as 5 million out of Pakistan's 145 million
people. A widespread return to poppy farming in neighboring Afghanistan is
expected to flood Pakistan with cheap heroin, aggravating an already
volatile problem.

Poppy Fields

Opium poppy cultivation dropped sharply in Afghanistan after Mullah
Mohammed Omar's July 2000 edict banning such production. With the Taliban
now crippled, Poppy growth is expected to increase again.

Poppy Producers In Afghanistan

Color-coded map shows areas with Highest, Midlevel, and Low.

Highest poppy production areas on map are Nangarhar and Helmand.

Poppy Cultivation (In Acres)

Graph shows poppy cultivation from '96 through '01

'96........ 140,417

'01........ 18,795

Source: United Nations Drug Control Program / Los Angeles Times