MEDICAL USE OF AFGHANISTAN'S OPIUM WON'T SOLVE THE
PROBLEM

Prescribed Heroin For Long-Term Addicts Would Be A Better Way Of
Reducing The Drug Trade, Says Steve Rolles

This week's alarming UN reports on the Afghan opium crop, showing that
it now accounts for over 93% of global illicit production, prompted
much debate. A Guardian leader (The drugs don't work, August 27)
acknowledged the futility of eradication efforts, but gave qualified
support to the Senlis Council plan to pilot the licensing of Afghan
opium production for medical use.

Superficially, the idea has great appeal, potentially helping
Afghanistan toward political stability and filling the apparent
shortfall in medical opiates. Yet the Senlis vision is both
ill-conceived and impractical.

As other experts identified in another article (Eradication or
legalisation?, August 29) the plan faces a raft of political and
practical problems relating to Afghanistan's chaotic status as a
failed state and war zone. Furthermore the medical opiates "shortage"
is primarily related to bureaucratic and licensing issues for UN drug
agencies leading to underuse of existing stocks, rather than a
shortage of raw opium. Flooding an already saturated market would
potentially cause precisely the supply/demand imbalance that the UN
control system was designed to prevent.

Simon Jenkins (Britain is stoned at home and sold out in Helmand,
August 29) identifies the core problem common to all of the solutions
being widely discussed: where such huge demand and profit
opportunities exist, criminal profiteers will always find a way to
supply. The only real solution is reducing domestic demand for the
illicit product.

The government has spent billions trying achieve this through
supply-side enforcement and coerced treatment. And yet UK heroin use
rose from 1997 to 2001 before stabilising at its current historic
high. The alternative, one that can collapse the Afghan opium market
and largely eliminate illicit supply, is to repeal the global
prohibition on non-medical production, supply and use. In the short
term this process can begin by dramatically expanding the prescribing
of heroin in a clinical setting to the UK's long-term addicts. This
does not require "legalisation", merely an expansion of existing legal
frameworks. Longer-term falls in problematic use can only be achieved
by addressing the underlying causes rooted in social
deprivation.

Such a move has the support of numerous senior police and policy
makers, and a long international track record of success on key
public-health and criminal-justice measures. The only obstacle is
political cowardice in confronting the failure of a US-inspired "war
on drugs".

While undoubtedly useful in stimulating debate, the Senlis proposal is
now casting a shadow over more thoughtful and cautious policy work
being undertaken by other drug-policy NGOs. There may be a place for
smaller-scale licensing of Afghan opium at some point in the future.
But there is a danger that an overhyped but ultimately doomed
"legalisation" plan is potentially undermining a reform movement
struggling to promote a more nuanced exploration of realistic models
for regulated drug production and supply that includes non-medical
use.

Steve Rolles is the Transform Drug Policy Foundation's information
officer