By Mary Mostert, Banner of Liberty (www.bannerofliberty.com)
September 28, 2001
In my analysis on Thursday I noted that the Afghan people, though living in a land with a limited amount of arable land, similar in fact to the small about of arable land in Japan, they once were able to feed themselves and export food. Their most profitable export at that time was karakul lambskins used for expensive fur coats.
Today they are increasingly dependent upon humanitarian assistance for food and their major export is opium. I suggested that there was connection between their opium production and their food scarcity. To my surprise, I got several e-mail from people who disagreed with that analysis. One writer observed:
Your article makes some good observations, but draws illogical conclusions:Opium production, a portable cash crop the Taliban government will buy for export, is much more remunerative than raising wheat the starving Afghans cannot buy because they are destitute after decades of CIA sponsored civil war. The Taliban government has no interest in becoming self-sufficient in food: a starving populace does not have the strength to revolt and throw them out.
The part of the drug economic chain we can most readily influence is not the production end, which is in poor Third-World countries where peasants are struggling to survive, but here in the world's most affluent market where we buy at high prices, providing enormous profits for the criminal middlemen who readily pay off the politicians and/or war lords who could help or hinder their commerce. If we legalized the drugs and provided effective rehabilitation for drug users, most of the profits, and much of the trade, would wither away, and with it the flow of money into side-line operations of gun-running, terrorism, and war-lordism reinforced by religious and political propaganda.
First, the CIA did not "sponsor the civil war." The CIA did try to help the Afghans who were resisting the invasion of Afghanistan in the 1970s by the Soviet Union. The Afghans have been fighting among themselves for generations. After ousting both their king, in 1973 and the Soviet Union, in 1989, they were not able to get along among themselves well enough to maintain a central government. We Americans are not responsible for that in Afghanistan, in the Balkans, in Africa, in Ireland, in Eastern Europe or anywhere in Asia. We may not always do the right or the sensible thing in trying to help in conflict situations, but to say we are responsible for them simply ignores history.
Anyone who thinks that opium and its products, crack and morphine, should be legalized needs to look at the history of nations where widespread use of opium products have been allowed. China fought a war with Western powers over their determination to keep opium out of their nation. .In 1840 a Manchu official seized and burned a large supply of British-owned opium. Great Britain objected and demanded trading rights. War broke out between China and Great Britain which ended in 1842 in Britain's favor. The Chinese were forced to sign what the Chinese considered the first of many "unequal treaties." By the treaty the Chinese had to pay for the opium they had destroyed and for the cost to the British of figting the war. They also had to open five Chinese ports to free British trade. The British did not come under Chinese law and were thus given economic power, including the "right" to bring opium into Chinese cities. The United States, France and Russia took advantage of China's weakness and demanded similar privileges.
By 1940 there were more than 70 million drug addicts in China, about 18-20% of the population. Major cities were rife with crime. In some areas everyone even children, smoked opium. In the cities, tiny bottles of drugs were sold on the street corners like ice cream. People got high on the job. Overcoming drug use was Mao Tsetung's first step towards building a stronger nation. A major part of his campaign was to eliminate the sources of the opium to eliminate the sources of crime. Some of his other methods, while successful, might not be popular in the West.
Today, it appears, it is the West that is struggling with the same problem it forced on China a hundred and fifty years ago.
Another reader wrote:
It is economically insane to use limited resources for noble or at the least normal purposes and starve for it when you can use those limited resources to bring benefits at multiple orders of magnitude higher by using them for something else that someone will gladly pay that much for. ... The value of the raw product for contraband drugs mean they can afford a much higher standard of living. The choice is obvious to all but ... well you anyway.What would you do? Starve yourself in pious righteousness? Nah?
Although the illicit uses of their assets is deplorable, I challenge you to find a way out for them.
I think the reason I was so surprised at these e-mails was because I had not heard this kind of thinking since my childhood in the Great Depression when cotton was selling at 40 cents a bale. My father had abandoned us and we were very poor, even though my mother was one of the few college educated women in the community. We were living in Alabama and most of our neighbors were sharecroppers who planted cotton right up to the porch of their homes. They had no gardens. My mother, who was raised on a farm and had attended Kansas State Agricultural College, on the other hand, had a big garden which mostly fed us and she canned from that garden for the winter.
Mother tried hard to convince the neighbors, whose children were hungry and sickly, to use a small portion of their land to grow a garden so they could at least eat, whether or not the cotton sold. I can still remember how frustrated and exasperated we got because no one would adopt her newfangled way of thinking.
It appears that, after a lifetime of thinking that drug use was the equivalent to "freedom" it is going to be hard to convince the Sixties Generation crowd that drug is not the way to freedom but the way to the slavery of addiction and the threat of terrorism from the producers and merchants involved in drugs.
Hopefully President Bush is actually serious about halting the drug trade. It is obvious, from what has happened to the drug trade at our Southern borders, where drug smuggling has dropped by about 80% since September 11, that it could be stopped at any time America really gets serious about the issue.
And, of course, for those bleeding hearts who worry about what the "poor" Afghans will do when their source of income - opium - is eliminated, may I point out that when the use in America and Europe is eliminated, their source of income from opium will be eliminated. It only took a few animal rights activists to eliminate their export product. Where were all the liberals who now worry about the Afghans opium livelihood when that happened?
To comment: mmostert@bannerofliberty.com