PROBLEMS INSOLUBLE ONLY IF YOU'RE STUPID

A huge problem for -- and with -- the gang in charge in Washington
these days is that they define many of their successes as problems,
requiring ever more onerous applications of force and looted tax
dollars to "solve" what's already going fine.

In addition, they describe many of their real problems as "insoluble,"
when the solutions are right in front of their eyes.

No, we're not succeeding in creating a modern nation-state. But there is
good news in Afghanistan: The State Department reports the country is on
pace to produce a record opium poppy crop this year.

Afghanistan is already estimated by the United Nations to produce
three-quarters of the world's opium. The $2.3 billion trade is
responsible for half the poor nation's gross national product -- it's
one of the few crops that will grow there without irrigation.

Afghanistan's former ruling Islamist mob, the Taliban, restricted
production of opium poppies, thanks to Islam's backward prohibition on
narcotics. Now Afghan farmers are happily back at work producing their
most reliable cash crop. Opium traders will even loan the farmer money
to get back into production.

Opium, of course, is one of God's major gifts to man. The first book
of the Bible tells us that God gave man every flower- and seed-bearing
plant for his use, and few have proved more useful that the poppy,
whose sap can be made into codeine and morphine, which (along with
that other Godsend, cocaine) have relieved the pain and suffering of
millions.

So how do the folks in Washington respond to the fact that happy
Afghan farmers are once again making an honest living producing a crop
which is a Godsend to mankind?

"While Afghan farmers see little of the revenue generated from their
crops, billions of dollars from the sale of opium and its derivative
heroin are bankrolling criminal and terrorist organizations," moaned
the Philadelphia Inquirer in a Sept. 27 editorial.

Wait, it gets better: "Like the sharecroppers of America's past" the
poor Afghan opium farmer "typically never earns enough to pay off the
loan. Farmers who fall too far behind have been reported to give away
their daughters to satisfy a debt," the Inquirer wails.

Needless to say, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was first into the
breach, announcing last month that "coalition forces" in Afghanistan
will soon have another task to distract them from tracking down Osama
bin Laden -- burning poppy fields. Imagine how Americans would respond
if helicopters full of Afghan warriors descended on Virginia and
Kentucky, burning our tobacco crops. (Tobacco is more toxic and
slightly more addictive than the opiates, according to Dr. Andrew Weil
of the University of Arizona, who studies such stuff.)

Leaving aside for the moment the curious shortage of names and home
towns of the Afghan daughters who've been given away (the kind of
details a major newspaper might usually ask for), is the
consciousness-altering drug manufactured by the world's distilleries
"bankrolling criminal and terrorist organizations" and leading to the
distillers' daughters being sold into slavery? Of course not.

And why? The difference isn't the potency of the plant extract. The
difference is that booze is legal. Legalize all opium products, allow
the Afghans to ship through normal channels at reasonable profits, and
the criminals will lose their control over the trade and the farmers,
both.

It would then make no more sense for terrorists and underworld figures
to try and finance their truly evil enterprises through the opium
trade than it would for them to go into the business of manufacturing
and smuggling aspirin -- a product which our fine German friends at
Farben-Fabriken Bayer delayed introducing until 1899, the year after
they introduced heroin, since their chemists at the time considered
aspirin the more dangerous of the two formulations.

Legalize the poppy. Problem solved.