ANGRY OPIUM DEALERS PROTEST RAID ON SHOPS

Ghani Khiel, Afghanistan -- Soldiers stormed in by the hundreds, smashed
the bolted wooden doors of ramshackle shops and seized more than six tons
of opium at Afghanistan's biggest drug market. The raid this week was the
largest show of the interim government's resolve to wipe out the lucrative
opium trade that resumed with the fall of the Taliban. Now residents of
Ghani Khiel, 36 miles east of the provincial capital of Jalalabad, are
fighting mad -- and heavily armed. On Friday residents warned they were
ready to do battle with the government if a settlement is not brokered by
their elders, who were meeting to find a way out of the impasse. But
negotiations won't be easy -- 50 residents are in jail and the entire
village is up in arms. The U.N. Drug Control Program, meanwhile, warned
that it could take a decade to end poppy production in Afghanistan.