I am writing this Wednesday night at 10 pm, sitting outside my ‘chalet’ at Camp Holland, in Uruzgan province. This is my second night here at the camp which I am sharing with 2000 Dutch and Australian troops who our here trying to do their best to win a war against an enemy that is oftentimes invisible, always tenacious, and skilled from centuries of war against all manner of ‘invaders’. Like a volunteer fire department, when there are no external threats, they just turn on their rival tribes. Fighting has been part of their genetic code for centuries.
The chalet is basically a bomb proof locker—if it were refrigerated, it would be used for hanging meat at the butcher shop. It sleeps 4 in 2 bunk beds, and has a small fan but no through ventilation, which makes things a little stuffy when 3 stinky men seal themselves in a windowless room that has been sitting in 100 degree heat all day. While I am not compelled to write each night, it seems like something to do to kill time while the locker cools just a bit.
After almost two weeks in Afghanistan, I finally got to go outside to see a town, a mayor, some trash, and some nasty dirt roads. Ahh, perfect. Now we’re talking…. I am told by our security staff that I probably shouldn’t mention the names of people or towns, and I think I read some stuff posted around here making the same warning, though it was in Dutch with English subtitles. Something like ‘loose lips sink ships.’ Who knows.
This is a Pashtun area famous for being the home territory of the Taliban. Uruzgan is also famous for being the second largest poppy producing state in Afghanistan. With a little work, I think they could make it to number 1.
Listen, I don’t want to sound like a stoned out NORML hippie, but I wonder if the time will ever come when we can have a real conversation about drugs in the US? Why is it that we are Capitalists, but believe that we can alter the laws of supply and demand (is it a law? I think so. But I will check with my Economist nephew to doublecheck. I guess it could be a really big rule, but I think it is a law. But I digress). In the west, and some points between, appartently there is a demand for heroin. As I understand it, this demand fluctuates based on the supply of other drugs, fashion, and whether or not Paris Hilton is in jail.
Supply is furnished by your basic Afghan peasant farmer, who has very little water, and limited other crop options. (He also has limited life options—I was told this province has a 97% illiteracy rate. That’s right, only 3 out of 100 people can read. I don’t think this we are going to be outsourcing software design to Uruzgan any time soon). For instance, he can raise wheat, but locally produced wheat is more expensive than wheat imported from Pakistan, so there isn’t much of a market for the local stuff. But when it comes to growing poppies, Afghanistan is the best. Hands down.
So here you have a poor-as-dirt farmer with a family, given the basic choice---do I feed my family and do the ‘illegal’ thing, or do I let them starve but live a ‘legal’ life? The moral choice may make it clearer: Do I raise something that can lead to the addiction and death of others, but saves my own family, or do I watch my family starve because I shouldn’t produce a product that might harm others? If you are an Afghan farmer, the answer is for you to sacrifice your family for others. If you are a Virginia tobacco farmer, your family is going to be living large in a very nice house.
Sadly, this seems to me to no longer be just a hypocritical and ignorant drug policy, but a lousy terrorism policy as well. The best friend a poppy farmer has right now is the Taliban, which gives small loans (think loan sharking) for poppy planting, then gets paid back when the harvest comes in. They then smuggle the stuff out of here, add a very nice mark up, and buy an assortment of weapons which they then use to kill people with—although some might argue that the guns don’t kill people, that people kill people. (One way or the other, a lot of people end up dead).
The chalet is basically a bomb proof locker—if it were refrigerated, it would be used for hanging meat at the butcher shop. It sleeps 4 in 2 bunk beds, and has a small fan but no through ventilation, which makes things a little stuffy when 3 stinky men seal themselves in a windowless room that has been sitting in 100 degree heat all day. While I am not compelled to write each night, it seems like something to do to kill time while the locker cools just a bit.
After almost two weeks in Afghanistan, I finally got to go outside to see a town, a mayor, some trash, and some nasty dirt roads. Ahh, perfect. Now we’re talking…. I am told by our security staff that I probably shouldn’t mention the names of people or towns, and I think I read some stuff posted around here making the same warning, though it was in Dutch with English subtitles. Something like ‘loose lips sink ships.’ Who knows.
This is a Pashtun area famous for being the home territory of the Taliban. Uruzgan is also famous for being the second largest poppy producing state in Afghanistan. With a little work, I think they could make it to number 1.
Listen, I don’t want to sound like a stoned out NORML hippie, but I wonder if the time will ever come when we can have a real conversation about drugs in the US? Why is it that we are Capitalists, but believe that we can alter the laws of supply and demand (is it a law? I think so. But I will check with my Economist nephew to doublecheck. I guess it could be a really big rule, but I think it is a law. But I digress). In the west, and some points between, appartently there is a demand for heroin. As I understand it, this demand fluctuates based on the supply of other drugs, fashion, and whether or not Paris Hilton is in jail.
Supply is furnished by your basic Afghan peasant farmer, who has very little water, and limited other crop options. (He also has limited life options—I was told this province has a 97% illiteracy rate. That’s right, only 3 out of 100 people can read. I don’t think this we are going to be outsourcing software design to Uruzgan any time soon). For instance, he can raise wheat, but locally produced wheat is more expensive than wheat imported from Pakistan, so there isn’t much of a market for the local stuff. But when it comes to growing poppies, Afghanistan is the best. Hands down.
So here you have a poor-as-dirt farmer with a family, given the basic choice---do I feed my family and do the ‘illegal’ thing, or do I let them starve but live a ‘legal’ life? The moral choice may make it clearer: Do I raise something that can lead to the addiction and death of others, but saves my own family, or do I watch my family starve because I shouldn’t produce a product that might harm others? If you are an Afghan farmer, the answer is for you to sacrifice your family for others. If you are a Virginia tobacco farmer, your family is going to be living large in a very nice house.
Sadly, this seems to me to no longer be just a hypocritical and ignorant drug policy, but a lousy terrorism policy as well. The best friend a poppy farmer has right now is the Taliban, which gives small loans (think loan sharking) for poppy planting, then gets paid back when the harvest comes in. They then smuggle the stuff out of here, add a very nice mark up, and buy an assortment of weapons which they then use to kill people with—although some might argue that the guns don’t kill people, that people kill people. (One way or the other, a lot of people end up dead).
So here are your choices. (Ok, maybe it isn’t your only choices, but they are the two I have available while pondering the price of war and drugs while the crews of two helicopters circle the camp at 11 pm hunting for guys that might want to shoot us with their drug-bought weapons):
Lock up all heroin users for 10 years. Minimum. Little suburban kids, rich kids, poor black kids, or college professors. I don’t care. Lock them all up, tomorrow. And stop doing needle exchanges—addicts must comply with Darwin. These actions will make a big dent in the demand. The price will fall—and maybe these guys will start to grow wheat, or some other product. Even if they don’t all go out of business, lesser demand means lower prices, means fewer guns bought by Taliban.
Here is choice #2. Begin to apply Miracle Gro to poppy fields. Bring out Purdue agronomists to help with the process. Grow more poppies than the world could absorb. Just create so much supply that the price crashes. It happened out her in 97, and suddenly no more poppy raising. Low prices is a very cheap and effective drug eradication program.
Option 1 requires a lot of expensive steel toilets and prison cooked stewed tomatoes. Option 2 will marginally increase low end junkies, (high end junkies will move on to something more expensive and cool) and require some treatment costs. But either way, we stop harassing poor Afghan farmers, which means we stop driving them into the arms of the Taliban, (who they don’t really like anyway), we stop getting nice Dutch (and other) boys and girls killed, we stop spending billions on a war that is getting old quick, and we stop creating drug money to fund a Taliban that none of the farmers really like anyway—unless the alternative is starving to death. I assure you that the costs of prison (I have some meat lockers the Dutch will donate), or the costs of treatment and a DARE program for 2 year olds, will be covered by the savings, and we might even be able to fund universal health care with the change.
I may be crazy. But shouldn’t we talk about this stuff like grown ups? Or are we just cursed to keep doing the same thing over and over? If we don’t stop this, there wont be a government official in Afghanistan that isn’t bribed, the whole economy will continue its dependence on poppies, and we will just keep chasing bad guys up and down mountains, hoping that they really aren’t chasing us.
2 comments:
As the "economist nephew" I'll confirm that we do have laws of demand and supply. We even go so far as to use capital-L Law since these are about the only two propositions every economist can agree on. That is, unless the economist supports raising the minimum wage, in which case the Law of Demand gets thrown out the door. But to get back on topic, Nobel Laureate Gary Becker has long advocated drug legalization; see, for instance this blog post.
Yo, Hunter Thompson- I'll be sure to pass this blog on to Brad Gillies at the class reunion this August- I"m sure he can get in touch with people ready to bankroll this hypothesis into action tomorrow!
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