FOCUS / LEGALISATION OF OPIUM IN AFGHANISTAN

Chasing the dragon, without a clue

A debate is suddenly raging over the idea that legalising opium will solve Afghanistan's problems

By ALAN DAWSON

The idea that crime will end when we make criminal acts legal has always made sense to a loopy fringe of the libertarian persuasion. An influential advocate of this line of thinking now argues that it will end war. A worldwide debate is suddenly under way over the notion that Afghanistan's opium problem is no problem at all, really. It can be solved, literally, with the stroke of a pen. All that needs to happen is to eliminate the laws that ban the opium crop and the opium trade. Make opium legal. Make Afghanistan an opium-producing part of the morphine industry. Problem solved.

The theory of preventing criminal acts by legalising felony always has been out there. But a newspaper column by Anne Applebaum, a serious writer and blogger, has suddenly given strong legs to this strange notion. It seemed fitting that the column appeared the night before her newspaper, The Washington Post, announced it had signed a deal to distribute The Onion, a satirical paper. But the opium column was not satire, or at least not meant to be. It has gained wide exposure on Slate.com, owned by the Post, and in whole or part in scores of newspapers from Toronto to Teheran.

''That government is best which governs least,'' wrote the US pamphleteer Thomas Paine in what has become an axiom for some conservatives, but especially for libertarians. They see a world with a few laws against theft and bodily violence, but licence for pretty well everything else.

Libertarian arguments tend to be short, sweet but incredibly dismissive. Drug laws are bad, so there. Foreign aid is always wasted, believe it. If you don't like a movie, don't watch it but never cut it. Libertarians are almost always westerners, so: Immigration is good, except for the part about foreigners using government social services.

So it is with the problem of Afghanistan's opium. It's a huge problem. Opium farming, which is out of hand in Afghanistan, involves the economy and political stability, and enriches the enemy of the Afghan government.

The Applebaum column ignores or dismisses all of this as meaningless, and misrepresents most everything about the Afghanistan war and drug problems along the way. After the shock headline (''How to Solve Afghanistan's Drug Problem. Legalise It''), the column quickly degenerates. The crucial parts of the call to solve Afghanistan's drug problem by just making it all legal, are just about all wrong.

''Nato is fighting a war to eradicate opium from Afghanistan,'' Ms Applebaum states.

But the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (and the United Nations and the United States) are doing no such thing. They are fighting a war against the Taliban in order to stabilise Afghanistan and its government. As another critic has correctly noted of this faulty line: ''Cart. Horse.''

The Applebaum legalisation solution claims that, ''Every time a poppy field is destroyed, a poor person becomes poorer _ and more likely to support the Taliban against the Western forces who wrecked his crops.''

Wrong again. No Western force has wrecked a crop, except perhaps by accident during a battle.

Ms Applebaum notes that chemical spraying may soon take place against opium crops and ''Western planes dropping poisonous chemicals from the sky will feel to the local population like a military attack''.

No Western planes will spray Afghan opium under any existing plan or proposal. Afghan government agents, and only Afghans, slash and burn opium fields the hard way, on the ground. Spraying, in the unlikely event it occurs, will also be by ground-bound Afghans. And, by the way, although there are poor farmers that grow drugs, they mostly do so for warlords or, in some cases, actual drug cartels, and these rich men grow drugs on their plantations.

The author of the radical new plan to bypass all drug problems by abolishing laws against drugs has a plan to help the hapless Afghan farmers: Institute a complicated set of laws requiring them to grow opium for the worldwide medical morphine market.

And here the legalisation argument is on even shakier, more clueless ground than the uninformed background on the current state of the opium problem. The world took Turkey out of the international heroin supply line, she notes, by enrolling Turkey as a legal supplier of opium to make medical morphine. Finally, a fact that is generally correct; older people remember Midnight Express. But then, proposing to add Afghan opium to the market, Ms Applebaum makes two crucial errors. She seems to have no idea about the current opium/morphine industry, and she clearly knows nothing about the suppliers and their countries.

Well, briefly put, there is already more than sufficient morphine and sources of morphine. Any additional supply would simply overwhelm demand.

And while the single fact in support of legalising Afghanistan opium _ the success of integrating Turkey into the morphine industry _ is correct, Turkey is not the major supplier of opium. That would be Australia, whose Tasmanian opium farms are not even mentioned in the Applebaum plan. Ignoring these facts does not simply discredit the idea of placing the vast, ungoverned, war-zone opium production in Afghanistan under a different set of state-run control laws. It negates this silly argument entirely. The Afghan opium crop simply cannot be absorbed into the legal world market, where there is already a glut. Demand is quite small and constantly falling because of the availability of safer painkillers and the bad reputation of the addictive morphine.

As Rick Rockliff, the Field Operations Manager for morphine producer Tasmanian Alkaloids says correctly of the perilous world market: ''It only takes a tonne of morphine floating around the world looking for a home to cause the prices to go soft.'' Afghanistan in the most recent crop year had about 165,000 hectares under opium, and harvested 6,100 tonnes. The only overall effect that legalising Afghan opium could have is exactly the opposite of what the Applebaum plan claims. She believes that fighting the opium farmers and warlords in Afghanistan could prove ''as destructive and wasteful as the original Opium Wars''.

But legalisation, particularly under her terms of pushing Afghan opium into the world markets, would be exactly a second opium war.

The first Opium Wars occurred because of laws that forced Asians to produce, and ultimately to consume, drugs. Because there is no room for Afghanistan in a world market, the only predictable outcome if the barmy libertarians get their way is a second such war.

The idea of lessening or even eliminating the punishment for drug users may be a debatable subject. By all means, there should be discussion of wiping away many drug laws which only increase the penalties on people already victimised by drug merchants.

But legalising an entire, major drug trade will no more address or solve Afghan or world drug trafficking problems than a casino in Bangkok would affect or curtail the lottery numbers racket run by big-time mafia gangs against poor people driven to seek their dreams in a lucky draw.

The problem of opium in Afghanistan is one of the most serious, complicated issues in a globalised world. It cannot be trivialised away with a slogan like legalisation.

General News
Bangkok Post
Saturday January 27, 2007