THERE'S A WAY TO END AFGHANISTAN'S AND THE WORLD'S PAIN

In his address to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday,
Prime Minister Stephen Harper stressed the historic importance of the
UN-sponsored intervention in Afghanistan. The rich have conspicuously
come to the aid of the poor in the common interest. Calling it the
UN's "greatest test," Mr. Harper said, "we cannot afford to fail." He
then warned that "we haven't made Afghanistan's progress irreversible.
Not yet."

The gravest danger to this important project is that the foreign
forces in Afghanistan come to be regarded not as saviours, but as
invaders. One reason that this may happen has yet to receive proper
attention. It lies in the aggressive poppy-eradication program
promoted by the United States.

In addition to being ineffective, this program alienates the
population and materially assists the Taliban. It is, moreover, the
wrong policy, given the global shortage of essential painkillers --
morphine and codeine -- that are obtained from opium. The poppies are
needed and, if properly regulated, could provide a legal source of
income to impoverished Afghan farmers while, at the same time,
depriving the drug lords and the Taliban of much of their income.

This argument has been made by the Senlis Council, a think tank with
offices in London, Paris and Kabul that specializes in security
studies and global drug policy.

But we don't need the Senlis Council to tell us that crop eradication
is a failure. Earlier this month, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime
reported that, despite years of sustained efforts to abolish it, the
poppy crop in Afghanistan increased by nearly 60 per cent in the past
year.

The situation is worse in the south, where Canadian troops are
operating. There, cultivation more than doubled.

The illegal drug trade, estimated by the UN at $2.7-billion per year
and constituting more than one-third of Afghanistan's gross domestic
product, threatens to drive the country inexorably from a
narco-economy to a narco-state. In the narco-state, power will have
moved from elected leaders to drug lords and their Taliban allies.
This will spell death for democracy.

There is no disagreement about this. The disagreement has to do with
the best means of solving the problem. The current policy of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United States seeks to destroy
poppy crops and punish the farmers.

The Senlis Council (in co-operation with specialists in opiates and
their regulation, working at the Universities of Calgary and Toronto)
offers an alternative aimed at legalized, regulated poppy production
in Afghanistan to supply the developing world with needed
painkillers.

(By 2015, the World Health Organization estimates there will be 10
million cancer cases per year in the developing countries, in addition
to the millions of cases of HIV/AIDS. The WHO describes the expected
demand for opium-based medicines as a "world pain crisis.")

Traffic in morphine and codeine is licensed by the International
Narcotics Control Board. The INCB points out that the richest nations
(the United States, United Kingdom, France, Japan, Germany, Australia
and Canada) consume nearly all of the world's opiates, leaving 80 per
cent of the globe's population virtually without.

Could opiates made from Afghan poppies make up the shortfall, if the
INCB were to license growing there, as it does in France, India and
Turkey? Undoubtedly. Meeting the global demand for pain medication has
been estimated to require about double the current Afghan production.
Maia Szalavitz, a senior fellow at Stats, a media watchdog group, has
estimated the cost of buying the entire Afghan poppy crop at the
current market price, set today by Afghan drug lords, as about
$600-million -- less than the $780-million the United States budgeted
last year for eradication.

It's important to remember that buying poppies for legal use sends a
different message to the Afghan people than destroying their
livelihood to prevent illegal use. Legal traffic is, at once, more
profitable for farmers, who need no longer buy protection. It is
hugely more profitable in the long run, since it allows citizens to
share in the benefits of a stable, law-based society -- the very thing
that we, our NATO allies, and the elected government of Afghanistan,
are seeking to achieve.

Moving to this new regime of lawful poppy and opiate production causes
difficulties. Not because the international community would be
required to legalize any substance not currently legal, but because it
must agree to extend the privilege of legal production to a
jurisdiction accustomed, till now, only to the illegal.

Not to do this, however, would represent a culpable failure of
imagination on our part, in which we condemned the poor of rural
Afghanistan to crime because we regard this as their proper state.

The intervention in Afghanistan required courage and far-sightedness
on the part of the international community. Its success will depend on
our exercising those same qualities in the wider context of extending
to Afghanistan the benefits of regulated poppy farming that other
nations presently enjoy.