Kabul, Afghanistan – Afghanistan could reduce its destabilizing heroin trade by licensing an opium crop to produce medical morphine for export, a drug policy group said Monday, but the United Nations dismissed the idea as unlikely to work and the government called it premature.
The Senlis Council, a France-based group founded in 2002, released results of a study examining the potential for licensing poppy cultivation in Afghanistan – which produces an estimated 87 percent of the world’s supply of opium and its derivative, heroin.
The study argues for “licensed opium production in Afghanistan to provide essential medicine,” the group’s executive director Emmanuel Reinert said ahead of the study’s release at a symposium in Kabul.
Transforming some illegal poppy fields into legal ones could “address both the drug-policy crisis in Afghanistan and the pain crisis in developing countries,” which he said need opium-based medication to treat patients with cancer, AIDS and other diseases.
The Afghanistan representative of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime called the idea a “pipe dream” whose time has not come.
Afghanistan’s booming drug trade is suspected to be partially funding an insurgency and has sparked warnings that the country is becoming a “narco-state” less than four years after a U.S.-led invasion drove the Taliban from power.
UNODC director Antonio Maria Costa said last month that Afghanistan produced 4,519 tons of opium this year, down just 2 percent from 2004.
He warned it could take 20 years to eradicate opium, despite hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid
Reinert said eradication efforts and attempts to get farmers to produce different crops have been largely ineffective.
Doris Buddenberg, UNODC’s country representative, said Afghan farmers would likely reject offers of legal world prices for their crops. She also said lack of potential supply is not the main reason for the low consumption of opium-based medicine in developing countries.
“So I see many very many practical problems, from the producers to the final use of the product,” Buddenberg said.
She said the Afghan government should carefully consider any proposal that could help them resolve the crisis, and discuss it with international drug control bodies.
“However, the UNODC’s position is very clear: There is no way out at this point in time in the direction of legal production,” she said. “This is a pipe dream.” Afghanistan’s counternarcotics ministry welcomed the study but said legal opium poppy cultivation is impossible at this point.
“The poor security situation in the country means there can simply be no guarantee that opium will not be smuggled out of the country for the illicit narcotics trade abroad,” counternarcotics minister Habibullah Qaderi said. “Without an effective control mechanism, a lot of opium will still be refined into heroin for illicit markets in the West and elsewhere. We could not accept this.” The statement said the government must focus on reducing poppy cultivation.
