The BMA wades in

The British Medical Association has become the latest organisation to propose channelling Afghanistan’s opium into legal pain-relief. With a diamorphine shortage in the UK, the medical experts are demanding greater access to the drug after forced recourse to less-effective alternatives. But as the International Narcotics Control Board reports, there remain substantial global reserves of morphine; as the British government recognises, dwindling stocks of diamorphine stem from a lack of facilities for chemically converting morphine, not from a lack of supply. The BMA is using this bottleneck to make a geopolitical point.

The proposals of the Senlis Council to licence Afghanistan’s opium are becoming increasingly fashionable but remain seriously flawed. Constructing the facilities to produce diamorphine - heroin - in disparate factories across Afghanistan’s badlands, as Senlis proposes, promises to shove the high-value end of the drugs trade into the hands of insurgents. Few Afghans would reap the benefits of poppy licensing, with only 1% of the cultivatable land dedicated to poppy. Other charities in the country, such as Christian Aid, stress long term support such as irrigation for the other 99%. If Afghanistan stabilises, and if a chronic shortage of morphine does emerge, there will come a time when legalising and regulating the opium trade makes sense. The Senlis Council may be making inroads into western liberal opinion, but its proposals, for now, are good for neither Afghanistan nor the world.

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.

Food for thought

The Economist leads this week with claims that "ethical shopping harms the world" - "people who want to make the world a better place cannot do so by shifting their shopping habits: transforming the planet requires duller disciplines, like politics." It trains its sights on three targets: the organic, Fairtrade and local-produce movements. Organic farming is far less intensive than chemical methods and thus requires much more land under cultivation, threatening wilderness. Fairtrade encourages overproduction by providing a disincentive to diversify, with the corollary that commodity prices are depressed for the majority of farmers not fortunate enough to fall within a Fairtrade scheme. Local food with supposedly fewer "food miles" is often much more energy intensive to produce, and smacks of protectionism reinvented as environmental-awareness. The only way to make a real difference, claims the Economist, is through the ballot-box, influencing governments to introduce a global carbon tax, reform the world trade system and abolish agricultural tariffs and subsidies such as the notorious CAP. Ethical-food movements, while offering the hope that governments will recognise the potential support for an ethical agenda, may nevertheless "leave the world in a worse state and its poor farmers poorer than they otherwise would be".

All of which is short-term and naive. As the Economist admits, buying ethical food "sends a signal that there is an enormous appetite for change and widespread frustration that governments are not doing enough to preserve the environment, reform world trade or encourage development" - but it tucks this concession at the very end of it's article and chooses instead to stress the manifold ways in which ethical food is self-defeating. There are very few ethical organisations that believe governments are not at the heart of any realistic solutions. But to lecture consumers that real change only comes through the ballot box ignores the lack of choice voters are faced with unless ethical movements pursue parties and governments to co-opt part of their agenda. The intentions of organic and local food pressure groups are admirable, but for me they are not priorities. Fairtrade, however, is, and I will continue to support it despite the qualms I have over its actual impact. I will also indeed continue to vote, but my power at the ballot box can only be enhanced by a movement which seeks to influence what the parties have to offer.

Consider the Lilley...

Went to a talk by the Rt Hon Peter Lilley MP (Hitchin & Harpenden; Con) last night in the Latimer Room, Clare College, entitled 'Why isn't poverty history (after $1 trillion of aid)?' As the recently appointed Chairman of the Conservative Party’s 'Globalisation and Global Poverty' policy group, Lilley delivered an informed and stimulating speach, if one which could have been delivered by any member of the Big Three British political parties. It got me thinking at any rate. If 'Making Poverty History' was the moral vogue of 2005, that of the moment, in the wake of the Stern report, seems to be 'Making Climate Change History'. Could these noble causes prove in conflict over the coming years?

The liberal chatterati should beware, because they could. Peter Lilley was keen to see commerce as the cornerstone of development, but I put it to him in subsequent discussion that efforts to increase the volume of trade and tourism between the developed and developing worlds would increasingly rub against a new emphasis on localism in production and a concern with 'food miles' and 'carbon footprints'. Save promising to defend the world's poor against the depradations of his counterpart John Gummer at the Tories' 'Quality of Life' policy group, and mouthing about the potentials of carbon trading, he had little response. Yet thus far, those preaching ecological catastrophe have seemed remarkably blinkered to the wider impact of winding down our imports from developing nations and cuting back our carbon-intensive flights. I am in no way doubting the vital threat of climate change: it is the single greatest challenge of the 21st century. But recognition of the potential conflict between development and environment is thus far an element largely missing from the debate.