Thursday, June 26, 2014
Afghanistan resumes opium production
Now that the NATO forces are leaving and the government in Kabul has the support of the major drug kingpins, opium production has increased immensely.
Illegal opium cultivation occupies more land worldwide than ever before, according to the United Nations, largely because of a surge over the last year in Afghanistan, the dominant opium producer.So far the only known method of seriously curtailing opium production in Afghanistan is to let the Taliban run the country. We are not about to willingly let that happen.
The annual World Drug Report, released Thursday, found that nearly 741,000 acres worldwide were occupied by opium-producing poppy fields, the largest area devoted to the farming of the crop since 1998, when estimates were first available. Afghanistan’s poppy fields alone expanded by 36 percent from 2012 to 2013, taking up 516,000 acres. Myanmar, too, stepped up opium production; nearly 143,000 acres were devoted to poppy cultivation there.
The report, released on Thursday in Vienna, comes at a time of growing scrutiny of on the global treaties that prohibit the use and trade of opium, heroin, cocaine and the coca leaf and that underlie the militarized war on drugs. Bolivia briefly withdrew from the 1961 United Nations Convention on Narcotic Drugs to protest the ban on an indigenous tradition of chewing coca leaves, signing on to it again last year after winning an exception for leaf consumption. Last year, Uruguay also became the first country to establish a regulated legal market for marijuana.
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