IT'S POPPYCOCK TO GROW CROPS HERE BUT DESTROY THEM IN AFGHANISTAN

Why Pay Our Farmers to Produce Opium While Afghan Poppy Crops Are
Razed, Asks Boris Johnson.

We are nearing the end of the season for the big ornamental poppies
that flower all over South Oxfordshire, the area I used to represent
in parliament. The petals have fallen to the ground, pink and purple
and red. But I expect the seed-pods are still standing tall. If you
take a sharp knife to one of those seed-pods, and make a careful
diagonal incision, you will see a white latex ooze out. What is that
gunk? That is opium, my friend; and the reason there are so many giant
poppies all over that part of England is that the seeds have been
blown in the wind or carried in the guts of birds. They have come from
the farms. We actually grow opium there, and we grow it officially.

At direct government urgings, there are large tracts of land that are
given over to the cultivation of the palaver somniferum, for the very
good reason that the opium is essential for the NHS. When we die of
cancer, or when we are carried off in any other mortal agony, our
final miseries are invariably palliated by opiates, in the form of
morphine or diamorphine, and indeed our respiration is typically
suppressed by these drugs in a vast and unadmitted programme of humane
killing.

Given this reality, and given the desperate shortage of analgesic
drugs that has occasionally hit the health service, opium has entered
the repertoire of UK cash crops. So how would you feel, if you were
sitting back on your terrace in Oxfordshire, and looking out at the
poppies waving in the fields, and you heard the thugga-thugga-thugga
of Apache helicopters? Suppose these helicopters were to disgorge
hundreds of dark-glass-wearing US troops, who were to advance with
flame-throwers and defoliants through the fields, destroying all the
vegetation they could see. I put it to you that you would be
exceedingly hacked off if you were a farmer. You would be most
unlikely to sense the slightest friendliness towards those Americans
or to the troops of any other country involved in the destruction. And
yet that is of course the policy to which we are at least notionally
committed in Afghanistan.

There are several respects in which the Afghan war has not yet been
successful, in the past eight years. We have not captured or killed
Osama bin Laden. We have not crushed the Taliban. We have not created
a stable and democratic nation-state. But there is one sector of the
Afghan economy that has positively boomed since 2001, and that is
poppy production. Before we kicked out the Taliban, the crop was
deemed un-Islamic, and production fell virtually to zero. Since the
unleashing of the War on Terror, combined with the War on Drugs, the
figures have been astonishing. Only 15 per cent of Afghanistan is
arable, and yet more of that land is now under poppy than ever before.
The illegal opium trade now accounts for about 52 per cent of the
Afghan economy, about $3 billion a year in revenues, and about 90 per
cent of the world supply of heroin. With that kind of money at stake,
it is no wonder that the Karzai government is said to have become
hopelessly corrupt.

No one has a real interest in stamping it out. The politicians are on
the take. The Taliban use drugs money to finance their operations.
American, British and other Nato forces have come to realise that
eradication programmes risk deepening local poverty and losing the
very "hearts and minds" they are there to win.

With the Taliban resurgent, and with British casualties mounting, and
with more illegal opium being grown than ever before, it is time to
look again at one obvious solution. Surely we should be pursuing the
argument first proposed three years ago by the Senlis council: to see
if we can work with Afghan villages and farmers to develop a
legitimate medical market for their crops. We have an ageing Western
population; we are making infinite advances in fighting disease and in
prolonging life. We are therefore going to be in need of ever more
painkilling drugs. The people of Afghanistan have shown they can grow
those drugs in quantity. Surely we should be helping them to turn
those poppies into medicine.

To put it at its bluntest: why are we paying our farmers to grow
poppies in Oxfordshire, and paying our soldiers to destroy them in
Afghanistan? Be in no doubt that what British troops are doing in
Helmand is heroic, and it is very far from futile. If Nato forces
pulled out, the Taliban would probably overrun Kabul in three weeks,
with catastrophic consequences for Pakistan and for global stability.
That is why we need them there, and that is why they deserve to be
properly armed and protected. That is why they need better domestic
support than the bizarre fence-sitting of the Liberal Democrats, who
simultaneously claim to be in favour of the Helmand operation while
cunningly playing to their anti-war constituency by criticising its
handling. Nick Clegg either believes we should pull out, or else that
the operation needs more men and material. He should have the guts to
say one or the other, and stop faffing around.

But it would also help our mission if our strategy was more closely
aligned with the real economic interests of Afghanistan. We have
utterly failed to stamp out the opium crop - quite the reverse. Let us
help the Afghans to obtain what legal value they can from their
poppies. No one should pretend that this solution is easy, or that it
is complete. As long as heroin is illegal in most jurisdictions (for
the foreseeable future, that is), the price of illegal opium will
probably be higher than the legal crop, and the drugs barons will not
be entirely undermined. But we should at least try an option that
offers the world cheaper pain relief, and the Afghans a viable legal
alternative for their harvest. Nothing else seems to be working. From
Homer to Flanders Fields, poppies have symbolised the sacrifice of
soldiers. The tragedy is that the illegal production of this flower is
now funding the killing of British troops. We need a better use for
it.