Poppycock?

Here's a full (and, exclusive to Constitutional Lore, hyperlinked) copy of an article I penned with Peter Inglesby for this week's TCS.

The international community should allow Afghanistan to legally grow and export opium. Or at least so says the Senlis Council, a European think tank with field offices across the central Asian country. Illicit poppy cultivation already dominates the Afghan economy, and American-led counter-narcotics strategies are only exacerbating Afghanistan’s development crisis. Meanwhile, across the world many of the poorest go without effective pain-relief for want of opiate-based medicines. Licence opium production, argue the policy-wonks at Senlis, and allow Afghan farmers a livelihood easing the world’s pain.

The argument is seductive in its simplicity, and an array of facts can be marshalled to back it up. According to a report of November last year by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “the opium sector remains Afghanistan's largest source of export earnings and a major source of incomes in the rural areas”. Afghanistan’s ‘Opium GDP’ amounted to $2.7 billion in 2005/6, equivalent to 27% of the country’s total (drug-inclusive) GDP and 36% of licit GDP. A successful eradication campaign would by 2010 shrink the economy by 8.7%. Yet why eradicate when the Afghan poppy can be put to legal use? The International Narcotics Control Board estimates that developing nations - four fifths of the world’s population - account for just 6% of global morphine consumption. “If the availability of drugs in developing countries is not improved”, argues the INCB’s President, Professor Hamid Ghodse, “lack of access to opioid analgesics will cause massive amounts of unnecessary pain and suffering.” Sadly, legalising and licensing the Afghan opium trade isn’t the panacea Senlis claims it is.

The benchmark transition from illegal to licensed poppy cultivation occurred in Turkey in the 1970s. With American backing, Turkey went from a major source of heroin, feeding 80% of the US market, to one of the largest suppliers of medical opiates. But the situation in Afghanistan today is simply incomparable to that in Turkey 35 years ago. To be sure, Turkish politics was fractured and unstable, but it possessed a modern state capable of the strict regulation and control of its agriculture, industry and exports. The Afghan government’s writ barely runs beyond Kabul. Narco-corruption is endemic and reaches the highest levels of government, and it would be all but impossible to prevent the channelling of legal cultivation into illegal processing and trade. The UN and the Afghan government have come out against the Senlis Council’s idea, as has the INCB itself, fulminating in an annual report “the idea that legalizing opium poppy cultivation would somehow enable the Government to obtain control over the drug trade and exclude the involvement of criminal organizations is simplistic and does not take into account the complex situation in the country.”

Senlis are also wrong in their diagnosis of the global ‘pain crisis’. The INCB reports that for the foreseeable future, such is the “high level of stocks of raw materials held in producer countries, the total supply of opiate raw materials (production and stocks) will be sufficient to cover the expected demand.” Inadequate access to opiate-based pain relief in developing countries is primarily due to the basic nature of their healthcare systems. The world’s pain would not be eased by a sudden new source of licit morphine, and in any case it is far from clear how Senlis propose to establish the pharmaceutical industry needed to produce the “‘Fair Trade’ Brand of Afghan Morphine” they envisage.

But if the Senlis Council’s scheme is currently impractical, it should not be dismissed out of hand. Licensed opium production could at some point in the future form an important facet of the legal Afghan economy and should not be ruled out. It needs to be recognised that the West’s home-grown problems and prejudices, feeding into the opinions of bodies such as the UN or the INCB, clouds its handling of the Afghan situation. To condemn poppy cultivation for the production of pain relieving drugs on the basis that doing so would fuel the trade in illicit opiates is to prioritise Western concerns with drug crime over the economic development of Afghanistan. It would be wrong to argue that Afghan farmers should not be allowed to cultivate poppies simply because the profits accrued might be diverted to fund terrorists and criminals, for to do so would rule out any economically productive activity, clearly ludicrous if Afghanistan is to find its feet as a unified and stable country. Fetishising prohibition can perhaps be compared to US policies on HIV/AIDS, or to some of the knee-jerk pronouncements by those on the anti-capitalist ecological left about climate change. Automatic reactions based on blinkered ideological prejudices are never the way to decide policy or to win an argument. The proposal of the Senlis Council to regulate a legal Afghan opium industry is perhaps an idea whose time has not yet come, but concepts which challenge the cosy consensus of the international community and champion development are surely the best hope of future prosperity that Afghanistan has.