Baz Ratner/Reuters

GHAZIPUR, India — Afghanistan’s annual opium harvest is coming, and the Taliban are expecting this year’s bumper crop to fund yet another season of political assassinations and coordinated attacks like the ones that struck Kabul and other Afghan cities this Sunday.

According to the United Nations’ 2011 Afghanistan Opium Survey (pdf), Afghanistan’s farmers earned $1.4 billion from opium in 2011, an increase of 133 percent over the year before. That’s about 9 percent of the country’s G.D.P.

Afghan opium is processed into heroin, which then floods the streets of cities, well, just about everywhere. The proceeds pay the Taliban’s fighters and suicide bombers.

On the other hand they also keep Afghan farmers from starving (pdf). What to do?

We should buy Afghan opium.



I don’t mean you and me as individuals. I mean Uncle Sam. If the United States and its partners bought all of Afghanistan’s opium, a major source of corruption ( pdf) in Afghanistan would disappear, violence in Taliban-affected areas would fall, world supplies of heroin would crash, and a global shortage of morphine — a source of much hidden suffering — could be alleviated.

The U.S. government spent roughly $4.7 billion (pdf) on poppy-eradication and antidrug programs in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2010, according to the Congressional Research Service. These efforts were largely futile. Partly realizing the problem, the U.S. government in 2009 suspended its eradication efforts and has since favored “alternative livelihood” programs to lure farmers to other crops. But this hasn’t stopped the opium trade either: opium is easy to cultivate, and the money is good.

Spending even, say, a couple of billion dollars a year to remove this cash crop from the market would be a bargain, even if all the raw opium — an estimated 5,800 metric tons in 2011 (pdf) — were simply dumped into the Indian Ocean.

But those sticky narcotic bricks could be put to better use. Afghanistan’s opium could help mitigate an ongoing shortage of morphine that is causing suffering in hundreds of thousands of homes, hospitals and hospices worldwide.

The World Health Organization estimates that 5.5 billion people (about 83 percent of the world’s population) have “low to nonexistent access” to opioid painkillers. “In 2006, the world used 231 tons of morphine equivalents,” Marie-Josephine Seya, of Temple University, and four co-authors wrote last year in the W.H.O.’s Journal of Pain & Palliative Care Pharmacotherapy. “If all countries increased their consumption to adequate levels, the required amount would be 1,292 tons, or almost 6 times higher.”

Romesh Bhattacharji, India’s former narcotics commissioner, believes Afghanistan should implement a licensing system like the one used in India. Here, opium is grown by accredited farmers and processed at government factories, such as the one in Ghazipur, a northern city on the banks of the Ganges. From here it is exported or processed into codeine and other medicines.

“Past eradication efforts . . . were a failure,” Bhattacharji told me last year. “In contrast, opium licensing in Afghanistan makes real sense” because it would provide an honest living to Afghan farmers while meeting the medical needs of many others. “There will be some inevitable leakage into the illegal market,” Bhattacharji conceded. But that would be progress: right now all of Afghanistan’s opium is sold illegally.

Conventional efforts to cut opium production in Afghanistan haven’t managed to dampen the heroin trade. Meanwhile, cancer and AIDS patients worldwide are living and dying in needless pain. So let’s cut out the middlemen, the illicit processors and the kingpins, and simply buy Afghan opium ourselves, in bulk, year after predictable year.