What About Opium Licensing?

By Hootsbuddy

MSNBC carries a WaPo story about yet another US effort to reduce poppy production in Afghanistan.

The U.S. and British governments plan to spend millions of dollars over the next two months to try to persuade Afghan farmers not to plantopium poppy, by far the country's most profitable cash crop and a major source of Taliban funding and official corruption.

By selling wheat seeds and fruit saplings to farmers at token prices, offering cheap credit, and paying poppy-farm laborers to work on roads and irrigation ditches, U.S. and British officials hope to provide alternatives before the planting season begins in early October. Many poppy farmers surviveAfghanistan's harsh winters on loans advanced by drug traffickers and their associates, repaid with the spring harvest.

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The average annual cash income of opium-poppy growing households in 2007 was 53 percent higher than those of non-opium poppy growing households," the U.N. 2008 Afghanistan Opium Survey reported, and "farmers in Helmand reported the highest cash income," 70 percent of which came from poppy.

The average Helmand farmer cultivates less than an acre of land, with about half an acre planted in poppy yielding a gross income of about $2,000. After paying 45 percent of that in production costs, and 10 percent in local taxes, he nets about $900, more than twice what he would earn from wheat at current, albeit rising, prices.

Extra workers travel from all over Afghanistan for the harvest, and the pay is higher than it is for virtually all other forms of unskilled labor. The average daily wage for construction work, the United Nations reported, is $3.60. Wheat harvesting earns $4.40, andopium "lancing/gum collection" pays $9.50. Wages in Helmand for lancing, $15 a day, are the highest in the country.

Go to the link for the gory details. Ask yourself what you would do if you were an Afghan farmer. It's like trying to persuade Wall street executives to lower executive compensation. Or getting elected representatives to consider the good of the country over their next election.

According to a recent UN report Afghanistan produces 93% of th world's heroin, although consumption worldwide seems to be declining.

...opium cultivation in Afghanistan, where 93% of the world's opium is grown, declined by 19% in 2008. Colombia, which produces half of the world's cocaine, saw an 18% decline in cultivation and a 28% decline in production compared with 2007.

Global coca production, at 845 tonnes, was said to be at a five-year low, despite some increases in cultivation in Peru and Bolivia.

Seismic shifts were taking place in the $50bn (�30bn) global cocaine market, the report suggested. "Purity levels and seizures [in main consumer countries] are down, prices are up, and consumption patterns are in flux. In Central America, cartels are fighting for a shrinking market."

Cannabis remains the most widely cultivated and used drug around the world. Data also shows that it is more harmful than commonly believed, said the report. The average THC content (the harmful component) of hydroponic marijuana in North America almost doubled in the past decade, which led to a big rise in the number of people seeking treatment.

Three years ago Michael Yon, one of our most outstanding wartime journalists, took a look at Afghan poppy production and concluded that getting farmer to switch from poppy production was not a bad idea. His report suggested that as long as they earned a living, Afghan farmers could be influenced to grow other crops.

Even the Taliban was able to eradicate poppy for one year (General McCaffrey�s understanding is that they were suppressing supply in order to maintain margins). And Afghan farmers are hardly committed to some sort of agricultural jihad to destroy kids in the West. But years of warfare coinciding with decades of drought devastated not just the land here; they also wiped out much of the connection people had to it as farmers, and much of their collective knowledge base dissipated like dust. Farmers simply want to plant the most profitable crops, and since Afghanistan is one of poppy�s favorite climates, illiterate farmers can grow it with ease. Crops that require more technical savvy to obtain higher yields � and thereby provide a source an income as well as a means of sustenance � are beyond the current capacity of the climate and of the people.

Sounds feasible, but a couple years prior to that, Senlis, a French think tank, had floated the notion of licensing opium production for the two-fold purpose of raising revenue for Afghanistan and redirecting production to legitimate markets. It could be used by drug companies marketing opiates for medical applications. Their study was reported at the time by the NYT. I picked up the idea at the time and grabbed this quote (now gone)  from the Senlis website.

Afghan opium represents is a huge potential to be re-directed into legal channels becoming a major driver for Afghanistan�s rural development and addressing the global shortage of opium-based medicines. Existing social control structures at different community levels would maximise the potential of opium, ensuring minimum diversion to the illegal market. The Senlis Council�s Feasibility Study on Opium Licensing in Afghanistan for the Production of Morphine and other Essential Medicines seeks to investigate the potential for Afghanistan to grow licensed opium poppy for the production of essential opium-based medicines. The next step of evaluation comprises a series of local pilot projects that will test the control and pharmaceutical aspects of poppy licensing for the production of an Afghan brand of humanitarian morphine.

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The opium licensing system is based on the comprehension that the opium issue is, at its core, one of economic resource management. By re-directing the opium poppy into the formal rural economy, it could become a major driver for a sustainable and diversified Afghan rural economy. Through the mobilisation of existing local governance structures, an opium licensing system could play a pivotal role in providing sustainable and legitimate income to rural communities, and establishing the rule of law by reducing the amount of opium flowing into the illegal market. By comprehensively addressing the real needs and concerns of the Afghan people, an opium licensing system would crucially reconcile security and development efforts

There is a sound legal basis for the implementation of an opium licensing system in Afghanistan � both in international and Afghan domestic law. In accordance with the UN 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, no authorisation or notification is required for Afghanistan to produce opium under a licensing system for its own domestic use or manufacture of morphine or codeine regardless of whether these are produced for domestic use or export. The 2005 Afghan Counter Narcotics Law contains extensive provisions for the establishment of a licensed poppy industry. Reflecting the provisions of the Single Convention, the new Afghan drugs law clarifies the conditions for the licensed opium cultivation for medical purposes and provides for the creation of the Drug Regulation Committee to oversee the licensed system. 

In 2007 the Centre for International Governance Innovation, another big study group, looked at the Senlis proposal and found it not to be feasible.

...The research concludes that the proposed approach has little potential for success under current political conditions in Afghanistan.

Fr�ric Grare, author of the CIGI study, says drug production and trafficking is a major governance issue in the country. "Although some of the proposals could indeed be applied," writes Dr. Grare, "their eventual success would require political conditions that are still missing in Afghanistan." In particular, no counter-narcotics efforts will succeed without ending corruption, creating well-functioning state institutions and strengthening the capacities of Afghan police and narcotics enforcement agencies.

He says the Senlis Council proposal also fails to demonstrate that there is a sufficient international market for opium-based medicines or that this market could be developed in the time necessary for the present reconstruction of Afghanistan.

"The exponential growth of the opium trade since the collapse of the Taliban regime in 2001 has been one of the principal obstacles to the Afghan state-building process," says Mark Sedra, CIGI Senior Fellow and resident expert on Afghanistan. "Only by expanding the Afghan state's capacity for law enforcement and stimulating comprehensive rural development that can provide alternative livelihoods for farmers can the steady growth of the trade be arrested."

According to both Fr�ric Grare and Mark Sedra, Afghanistan is speeding up its transformation into a narco-economy by legitimizing the position of the current drug lords who hold power in the country.

The original proposal was not forgotten however and in February 2008 was again up for consideration. Another UN report seemed to support the idea of licensing opium instead of attempting to eradicate it.

This year's [2008] opium harvest in Afghanistan will be 'shockingly high', according to figures released this week by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). They estimate that the country now supplies over 90 per cent of the world's heroin.

The news has fuelled criticism of the current US-led strategy, which aims to eradicate the crop. Instead, there is growing support for a scheme promoted by a European think tank, the Senlis Council, which hopes to establish a trial licensing scheme that would allow farmers to sell their opium for legitimate, medicinal use.

The Senlis Council started research into its Poppy for Medicine scheme in 2005, and in October 2007 published plans outlining exactly how a pilot scheme would run. The project has since received the backing of the European Parliament.

A key feature of the project is that farming communities could cultivate poppy crops, which would then be turned into morphine tablets in facilities built in Afghanistan. The Senlis Council says that this will help to build the infrastructure for producing medicines, and create legitimate trade and stability in the most insecure regions where insurgency is rife.<=>
The Senlis Council argues that the Afghan opium crop could be used to relieve a global shortage of opiates - and become a source of affordable analgesics, particularly within the developing world.

.....Four leading pharmaceutical companies contacted by Chemistry World declined to comment on the Senlis Council's proposal. One pharmaceutical industry insider said that no company was likely to comment on the potential for a legal market in Afghan opium, since the idea was far too politically controversial.

Nevertheless, there is substantial grass roots support for the licensing scheme. Speaking from Helmand in Southern Afghanistan, MacDonald said that she had received positive feedback from farmers. 'They want a chance to use the only thing they know - growing opium - to do something legitimate,' she said.

Romesh Bhattacharji, a former Narcotics Commissioner for India, where opium production has been licensed for more than 200 years, told Chemistry World that the Poppy for Medicine scheme is 'the only hope that there is for Afghanistan'.

'It will benefit the farmers most and then the communities, and by producing morphine almost at their door step, the villages will benefit from the technology and profit from its sale,' he said 'In Afghanistan, where there is so much pain, the consumption of morphine has now come down to almost zero.'

McDonald added that once a drug manufacturing infrastructure has been built within Afghanistan, it would provide farmers with the opportunity to grow alternative medicinal crops, such as Artemisia annua - the plant from which the anti-malaria drug artemisinin is derived.

That was last year. 

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I am one of the growing number of Americans who believe our efforts to make Afghanistan into a stable modern state are as ill-advised.  Recent comparisons with the Vietnam disaster are multiplying and I think they are correct.

But as long as we are there, I want to advance as many constructive suggestions as possible to nudge the enterprise away from violence, vice and destruction and toward making life better for Afghanistan, hopefully without killing so many people, both theirs and ours. 

This post puts several related links in one place for the interested reader. The post title is an attempt to plant and nurture the idea. The rest is up to others to spread the word and move this idea along the Overton Window continuum from radical to possible.