ITALIAN SOCIOLOGIST'S GOAL: MAKE OPIUM FARMING FADE INTO HISTORY

TASHKENT, Uzbekistan--Like the other former Soviet republics on the
drug route dubbed the New Silk Road, Tajikistan lacks the resources
to combat the flow of narcotics from neighboring Afghanistan en route
to Russia and Western Europe.

Afghanistan is now the world's largest producer of opium, the base of
a multibillion-dollar international heroin trade that feeds European
addiction.

If Pino Arlacchi has anything to do with it, however, opium should
become as much part of history in Afghanistan as it now is in
Thailand, which is getting ready to open a museum of opium.

Mr. Arlacchi, a 49-year-old Italian sociologist and expert on
organized crime, became the United Nations' top antinarcotics
official three years ago. Years of studying and writing about the
Italian Mafia, he said, convinced him that the war on narcotics does
not have to be fought with armies and tens of millions of dollars.

As he spoke, Mr. Arlacchi (pronounced are-LOCK-key), was flying over
the snow-covered peaks that separate Uzbekistan from Tajikistan, on
his way to open a new, experimental drug-control agency established
with United Nations help in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe.

Over the last year, the fledging Tajik agency and a force of 11,000
Russian border guards have reported seizing about 1.3 tons of heroin
from Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is equivalent to amounts
intercepted in Europe or the United States, Mr. Arlacchi said.

Opium poppy cultivation on a significant scale is now found in only
three countries: Afghanistan, Myanmar and Laos. With the help of a
$60 million international fund, Laos promises to be free of opium in
five years, Mr. Arlacchi said. Myanmar, formerly Burma, is down to 60
percent of recent production because of pressure from neighboring
Southeast Asian nations. Vietnam and China have also slashed opium
growing.

Law enforcement is not the only, or even the most important, part of
trying to convince poor farmers to stop producing narcotics, Mr.
Arlacchi said. "First of all, we have to convince people that
organized crime is not invincible," he said, recalling similar
experiences in Sicily. "We are not fighting enemies that are bigger
than us."

Now he is saying to skeptical governments that most narcotics
production can be eliminated more cheaply than most people think.
"The farmers do not get rich with opium production. In Afghanistan,
at $30 a kilo of opium, you are poor even if you produce 10 kilos.
The farmers get a minimal amount, so it's easy to provide them an
alternative. Even with the traffickers, who are supposed to make most
of the profit at origin, we're speaking about quite modest profits at
the source."

"So when I told people that for $25 million a year for 10 years we
can eliminate opium poppy production in Afghanistan, nobody believed
that," he said. "Even now, when I tell people that $3.5 million
invested in technical assistance to the agency in Tajikistan and the
Russian border troops there, we can block the northern heroin route,
people don't believe because they are used to inflated figures."

By Tajik standards, for instance, the 300 members of Tajikistan's new
antidrug squad--chosen, trained and equipped by European experts--are
very well paid at $100 a month in hard currency.

The money, contributed by several European nations, goes directly to
the squad members, not to the government, to minimize opportunities
for corruption.

Mr. Arlacchi argues that in an age of mass communication "every
peasant in the most remote areas of Myanmar or Afghanistan knows
perfectly that what he is doing is harmful for other people," and is
receptive to alternatives. But, he said, alternative crops sometimes
take too long to show a return, meaning that aid is needed--to people
and governments.

In Afghanistan, however, few foreign governments want to deal with
the Taliban, preferring a "ring of security" around Afghanistan to
contain the problem. Mr. Arlacchi said he is consistently refused
money to work inside Afghanistan.

It is also not clear how sincere the Taliban is in its pledges to
halt opium production. Their militias, who now control an estimated
95 percent of Afghanistan, face hunger on a national scale and
political disaster if they end opium production without offering
people alternative incomes.

When the Taliban order poppy production cuts, Mr. Arlacchi said he
sees the edicts as "more a way to test the cost of a measure like
this than a real, serious attempt to implement it."

In Tajikistan, the United Nations drug-control program cultivated
ties with the pro-Russian president, Emomali Rahmonov--a task that
Mr. Arlacchi said was easier than getting the backing of the United
States for a program that has so far spent $2.6 million.

Mr. Arlacchi, a tenured professor of sociology at the University of
Florence who left a safe seat in the Italian Senate to join the
United Nations in 1997, is one of several outsiders hired by
Secretary General Kofi Annan for their real-world expertise.

The Italian newcomer ruffled feathers at the United Nations' drug
program headquarters in Vienna, removing several top bureaucrats and
dispatching others into the field, away from their desks.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Arlacchi visited Bolivia, which is within months
of declaring itself free of coca cultivation, and found the backlash
against a coca ban there reminiscent of his Sicilian experience.
"There was a moment," he said, "when the economy in Sicily got bad
and there were demonstrations of thousands of workers against
us--construction workers with billboards saying: `We want the Mafia
back because the Mafia gave us jobs.' "

"In Bolivia, there are very harsh times, and you get demonstrations
of coca producers, cocaleros, who have exactly the same platform: `We
want to go back to cultivating coca because it gives us an income,' "
he said. "I told the Bolivian government that they have to be firm
not giving in, but at the same time they have to listen to them and
go ahead and give more resources."

In Thailand, Mr. Arlacchi recalled, the king told him about a village
where there was resistance to changing a water course to irrigate
fields. The farmers finally admitted that redirecting the water
channel was impossible because there was a ghost in the way. They
asked the king, who is considered superhuman by many Thais, to deal
with the ghost. He said he would, and the water soon flowed to the
needy new crops--at no cost at all to the United Nations program.