WOAR, in the comments to my previous post: "Given that the world needs a certain amount of opium for legitimate purposes, never mind the disputed ones, and Afghanis are very good at producing it, I simply can't see why the world doesn't treat it like any other crop as part of a mixed economy in Afghanistan and set about regulating it and securing the Afghani farmers' markets to bring at least some economic stability to their lives".
There were additional useful statistics in the print version of this article, which suggest that worldwide production of "illegal" opium outweighs the production of "legal" opium (used in hospitals etc) by three-to-two, so if you juggle the figures and make a few fair guesses, it appears that Afghanistan's total production is roughly equal to world demand for "legal" opium. So farmers in Tasmania, Turkey and France will just have to find something else to do. The demand for "illegal" opium (i.e. heroin) could be reduced significantly if we went back to the policies that we had until about 1970, of course.
That's that fixed. Next.
Wednesday, 2 September 2009
Woman On A Raft nails it
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4 comments:
But .. .. but .. .. .. if we went back to a policy that effectively destroys the illegal heroin market by removing the financial incentive to attract new customers that would mean that the WAR ON DRUGS failed .. .. .. wouldn't it?
Well done WOAR, and Mark for enhancing the point.
In instances of 24 carat common sense like this, I am always drawn to the same conclusion:
Either, the powers that be have the IQ of a ham sandwich,
Or, there's a scam going on (someone's making lots of money).
Wonder which it could be?
Where does Colombia come in on this?
CFF, yes. It might have been worth a try, but after eighty years, it's time to rethink it.
hermit, it's the Australian, French and Turkish farmers and the arms manufacturers who benefit from all this.
JH, I thought they did cocaine.
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