WAR ON DRUGS FILLING UP THE TALIBAN'S COFFERS

Letters In response to "Taliban Won't Be Pushover," a comment by Pavel
Felgenhauer on Nov. 22.

Editor,

While the Taliban's eradication of Afghanistan's opium crop was ostensibly
for religious reasons, the U.S. Department of State suspects that the real
motive was to increase the value of the Taliban-held opium stocks cited in
Pavel Felgenhauer's column.

Afghanistan profits from the heroin trade because of drug prohibition, not
in spite of it. Attempts to limit supply while demand remains constant only
increase the profitability of drug trafficking. Here in the United States,
the drug war distorts market forces to the degree that an easily grown weed
like marijuana is literally worth its weight in gold. In South America, the
various armed factions tearing Colombia apart are all financially dependent
on the obscene profits created by America's war on consensual vices.

The drug war is the problem, not the solution. Heroin produced in
Afghanistan is primarily consumed in Europe, a continent already
experimenting with public-health alternatives to the drug war. Providing
chronic addicts with standardized doses in a treatment setting has been
shown to reduce drug-related disease, death and crime. Addicts would not be
sharing needles if not for zero-tolerance laws that restrict access to
clean syringes, nor would they be committing crimes if not for artificially
inflated black-market prices. If expanded, prescription heroin maintenance
would deprive organized crime of its core client base. This would render
illegal heroin trafficking unprofitable, spare future generations addiction
and significantly undermine the Taliban's funding.

Harm-reduction policies have the potential to reduce the perils of both
drug use and drug prohibition.

Robert Sharpe
Program Officer
Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation
Washington