OPIUM: CURSE OR CURE?

Obsession with drug mafias and addiction has blinded western
governments to a chronic shortage of pain-killing opiates.

Billions of dollars and ever-increasing budgets thrown at opium
eradication and the so-called war on drugs have miserably failed to
stem the global flow of narcotics. This year's record opium harvest
in Afghanistan is 8,200 tons. Burma - still ruled by a brutal junta -
ranks second. Years of narcotics repression targeting the producer
countries has made no difference to the availability of heroin on the
streets of London and Glasgow or cocaine on the streets of New York.

The illegal opium trade in Burma and Afghanistan finances warlords
and sustains instability and various types of terrorism, yet almost
unnoticed in the media, the UN reports that the developing world is
experiencing a severe shortage of pain-killing opiates.

We inhabit a world of crazy skewered economics and market
distortions. The hospitals of Rangoon tell their cancer patients they
have no morphine to relieve the dreadful pain, and advise the
relatives to buy opium on the plentiful black market.

Developing countries are home to 80% of the world's population, but
they consume just 6% of the medication derived from the
much-demonised opium poppy. If it is shocking that drug addicts in UK
die from a heroin overdose, why are we not equally shocked that the
west's obsession with banning narcotics has contributed to such
dreadful deprivations that in the developing world, most patients
with cancer, AIDS and other painful conditions live and die in agony.

While western politicians, and narcotics agents demand that poor
farmers of the third world destroy their livelihoods, ie their coca
and their opium crops, we allow the rich farmers of Tasmania to earn
over $130 million dollars a year (1999 figure) from selling opium to
pharmaceutical companies.

In the mountains of landlocked dirt-poor Laos, hill-tribe peoples
have been cultivating opium for nearly 200 years - far longer than
Tasmanian farmers, the new boys on the opium bloc. Fierce US and EU
pressure forced a reluctant government in Vientiane to institute a
rapid opium eradication policy since 2001, causing the uprooting of
mountain villages, the loss of livelihood and a shocking increase in
disease and mortality.

The apparent success in reducing opium was a chronic failure in every
other respect. The UN's World Food Progamme now provides emergency
food aid in Laos to desperately hungry ex-opium farmers. Other far
worse drugs have replaced opium, that was not only a good cash crop,
but also an effective medicine for many ailments. A well-known
Laotian academic in Vientiane, a specialist in ethnicity and culture
bitterly complained to me recently: "This is not fair. Why is it OK
for Tasmania to profit from the benefits of opium but we have to
destroy our crop? Why not Laos?"

Eighteen countries are members of the licit opium cultivation club
with the approval of the INCB (International Narcotics Control Board)
in Vienna. Among the bigger players in the opium export market are
Australia, India, Turkey and Spain - we can call this group Opec2 [
Opium-Producing Exporting Countries].

Both morphine and codeine have featured on World Health
Organisation's (WHO) Model List of Essential Drugs since its
inception in 1977, while morphine is included in the WHO's New
Emergency Health Kit. Yet the INCB, far from ensuring these needs
have been met, actively discourages any more countries from applying
for a licence to grow poppies for medicine.

WHO experts say there is a strong demand for more opium for medicine.
Senlis, a European research institute, estimates that meeting the
global need for pain medications would require an additional 10,000
tons of opium a year - more than the combined output of Afghanistan and Burma.

The failure of opium repression surely demands some radical
rethinking and debate about alternative drug strategies, that focus
on health and harm reduction, rather than crude and ultimately futile
repression.

Western government and narcotic agencies are sadly so immersed in the
drug enforcement ideological straightjacket, that alternative
policies and any mention of legalisation tends to be glibly dismissed
out of hand as 'unrealistic' or 'unworkable,' closing the door on
debate, before a serious debate can even begin.

In Afghanistan where the opium economy is now constitutes 60% of
total GDP, it is hopelessly unrealistic to imagine that alternative
livelihoods can suddenly be delivered on such a scale to compensate
for vast losses that would be sustained by abandoning the opium poppy.

Realism lies in the opposite direction of alternative opium policies
and gradual steps taken towards a transformation from an illegal
Taliban fiefdom towards a state-controlled opium crop offering
extraordinary medical benefits including pain relief.

The evidence on the ground is that where opium crops have been cut
down, poor farmers have been further impoverished to the point of
destitution and bitter anger. This has bred support for the Taliban
insurgents in Afghanistan, and a 34% resurgence in poppy cultivation
in Laos (see UN 2006 Opium Survey).

The Senlis Council has proposed a win-win solution. Adopting it would
improve the Afghan economy, deprive terrorists of income and keep
heroin away from dealers and addicts, all while offering pain relief
to the third world. CIDA, the development arm of the Canadian
government, has funded a pilot study.

Can illegal opium successfully be turned into a legal win-win
situation where farmers, and government can enjoy mutual benefits?
Turkey is a very good example. Turkish farmers were very angry when
the government first introduced on a ban on their traditional crop
under pressure from the US government in early 1970s. Unable to
enforce the ban on illegal cultivation, Turkey with the consent of
the INCB and support from the UN to set up an opium processing plant,
switched to state control and licensing for the legal pharmaceutical
market. It has been a success story ever since.

Why burn and destroy opium crops in Afghanistan, Burma and Laos, when
their poor farmers could so easily derive the same legitimate income
as their counterparts in India, Turkey and Tasmania? And if there
should be over-supply in the future, trade justice would dictate that
the developed countries of Australia, France and Spain should cut
back their quotas in favour of the poorest farmers from the poorest countries.

The logistics and problems are of course not identical. Afghanistan
is in the midst of war and government first has to gain control of
Helmand province. In Laos it would be far easier to implement with
international supervision and technical inputs. In Burma opium and
opium taxes have fuelled all sides in the Shan states. The generals
have long profited from a narco-economy.

Given the repeated failure of drug wars, and the obsession with
targeting the producers in the global chain of supply and demand, it
is time to face up to the inconvenient truth that the US-driven
strategy is unworkable. There are no easy simple alternatives, but
Turkey has shown that with the political will it can work.