AT LAST SOME SENSE: MEDICINE FOR POPPIES

The Taleban Aren't Going To Like This . . .

Britain leads a #1-billion-a-year international programme to eradicate
illicit opium production in Afghanistan by destroying farmers' poppies
and persuading them to grow other crops.

As an anti-narcotics strategy, this programme is a demonstrable
failure.

In terms of counter-terrorism, it is a disaster.

But a scheme unveiled this week can, finally, offer some
hope.

Six years into the eradication programme, Afghanistan produces 92 per
cent of the world's opium, more than ever before.

This is not going to change, or not by enough to wean Afghanistan from
its deadly dominance of the heroin trade.

Last year, the area under poppies increased to 165,000 hectares, 59
per cent more than in 2005. It was up by 169 per cent in Helmand
province, where, as British field commanders attest, opium profits
fill Taleban coffers and eradication acts as their recruiting sergeant.

The Taleban pose as the poppy farmers' protectors. The Government has
to defend the farmers better, or lose the battle for their allegiance.

Afghanistan's counter-narcotics operations are a corrupt
farce.

A mere 8 per cent of total acreage was destroyed last year, and the UN
reports that, when eradication teams finish work in a village, two
thirds of the crop has typically been left standing.

Local politicians order the destruction of rival crops and protect
their own. Of the $75 million given or pledged to the Government's
trust fund for alternative crops, a paltry million has actually been
spent.

The problem is not merely corruption and inefficiency, but the lack of
viable alternatives. Wheat, the other main regional crop, yields a
tenth of the cash to be made from poppies, not enough to feed
smallholders' families.

Does Britain have a plan any more for dealing with the soaring drugs
crisis in Afghanistan?

The Foreign Office stolidly insists that poppy eradication, coupled
with improved law enforcement and better managed rural aid, is the
only approach.

This is whistling in the Afghan wind. Eradication is worse than
ineffective; it dangerously alienates villagers whose first or perhaps
only contact with central government is the convoy that rips up their
means of survival. Without counting the gangsters who dominate the
traffic, opium involves 2.9 million Afghans in cultivation and another
225,000 traders – 14 per cent of the total population. So many
people cannot be treated as criminals.

Nato refuses, with reason, to be directly involved in eradication;
inflicting ruin on the people you are there to protect is no way to
"win hearts and minds".

How then to escape this Catch-22? Governments have considered
routinely buying up and destroying the entire crop, but that would
reward illegality. Moreover, the Taleban exact a share of farmers'
income from opium, so much of that cash would go to the Taleban. The
Canadians favour paying farmers the same prices for other crops that
they get for opium poppies, a recipe for enriching corrupt officials
and further distorting the Afghan economy.

Local surveys show that opium farmers, many of whom are deep in
opium-denominated debt to traffickers and who see less than a third of
the theoretical "market price" for their crops, would far rather earn
a living legally. But opium is by far their most reliable "banker"
crop.

Taking the poppy out of the Afghan equation is impossible. So why not
turn those 6,100 tonnes of poppies into a legal source of wealth?

The world is desperately short, it happens, of affordable opiate-based
painkillers. In developing countries, these drugs are either
unavailable or unaffordable. Processed into pills, the Afghan crops we
are spending millions attempting to destroy could meet that need,
exporting relief instead of misery to millions.

There are precedents. In Turkey and India, the illicit trade has been
channelled into licensed production for medicinal purposes.

The US Government objects that Afghanistan's weak Government could
never insulate "legal" production from the drugs chain.

But at village level, the country's traditional shuras, or councils,
exercise powerful systems of social control. This week the Senlis
Council, an independent medical research organisation based in France,
came up with a scheme to involve them in legal morphine production.

The key feature of "Poppies for Medicine" is to create village
industries that turn opium into medicine in local factories.

All profits would go to the community, giving the shuras of the
participating villages a strong vested interest in preventing
diversion to traffickers and turning informer against the drug barons.
The idea is to select clusters of five to ten villages and sign
contracts with the shuras.

The shuras would guarantee each village's committed participation,
decide what land to cultivate, employ harvesters, guards,
record-keepers and informants, and ensure that the whole village
shared in the benefits.

The shuras would be responsible for monitoring production and
punishing individuals caught diverting opium.

Failure to do so would lose the village its licence.

Because the price of morphine medicines is far higher than for raw
opium, the scheme would boost incomes and local tax revenues and give
villagers a future within the law, worth fighting the drug barons to
secure.

It would take raw opium out of the supply chain.

At the other end of the benefit scale, cheap Afghan morphine pills
could be exported, much like generic HIV/Aids drugs, to countries that
could not otherwise afford them.

The scheme is compatible with existing Afghan law and international
regulations on narcotics control.

Gordon Brown should insist on putting the idea to the test. Poppies
for Medicine will not solve Afghanistan's opium crisis overnight, but
a shift to licensed production could turn a losing battle into a win
for Afghanistan and the world.

It would be folly not to try.