The Poppy is Also a Flower
Today is Sunday, 3 September 2006.
Today’s The New York Times reports that opium poppy production in Afghanistan has reached the highest levels ever recorded.
In part, this is due to endemic poverty. In part, it is due to the fact that many of the guerilla groups which fought the Soviet occupation farmed opium poppies to supplement the hundreds of millions of dollars they received from the Central Intelligence Agency. They continued this practice while fighting the Taliban before and after 9/11, and now as they form elements of the current Afghan government.
An ingenious solution has been proposed. (Your author apologizes that, due to a change in location of the Museum of the Bourgeois, many files of the archives are still boxed, and he can’t put his hands on the essay suggesting this solution. He also apologizes to the author of the essay, since MoB tries to be scrupulous in giving credit where credit is due.)
Along with heroin, opium poppies can be used to produce morphine, one of the most valuable medical tools for managing pain. While morphine is readily available in the First World, it is often prohibitively expensive and thus scarce in the Second, and especially Third, Worlds.
Why not establish a program, through the United Nations, to regulate Afghan opium poppy production, pay farmers a fair price for their product, and use it to manufacture morphine, to be made available at little or no cost to nations which urgently need it?
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in eradication programs, and the result has been more and more heroin flooding world markets. These programs show little promise for the future.
Why not try this ingenious solution? Could it really make things worse? Why should poverty continue to imprison in pain hundreds of millions of the sick and dying, when possible help is so readily at hand?
Alleviation of suffering should not be the nearly-exclusive property of the richest fraction of humanity.
Today’s The New York Times reports that opium poppy production in Afghanistan has reached the highest levels ever recorded.
In part, this is due to endemic poverty. In part, it is due to the fact that many of the guerilla groups which fought the Soviet occupation farmed opium poppies to supplement the hundreds of millions of dollars they received from the Central Intelligence Agency. They continued this practice while fighting the Taliban before and after 9/11, and now as they form elements of the current Afghan government.
An ingenious solution has been proposed. (Your author apologizes that, due to a change in location of the Museum of the Bourgeois, many files of the archives are still boxed, and he can’t put his hands on the essay suggesting this solution. He also apologizes to the author of the essay, since MoB tries to be scrupulous in giving credit where credit is due.)
Along with heroin, opium poppies can be used to produce morphine, one of the most valuable medical tools for managing pain. While morphine is readily available in the First World, it is often prohibitively expensive and thus scarce in the Second, and especially Third, Worlds.
Why not establish a program, through the United Nations, to regulate Afghan opium poppy production, pay farmers a fair price for their product, and use it to manufacture morphine, to be made available at little or no cost to nations which urgently need it?
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in eradication programs, and the result has been more and more heroin flooding world markets. These programs show little promise for the future.
Why not try this ingenious solution? Could it really make things worse? Why should poverty continue to imprison in pain hundreds of millions of the sick and dying, when possible help is so readily at hand?
Alleviation of suffering should not be the nearly-exclusive property of the richest fraction of humanity.
posted by HH at 8:26 AM
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