(Bush liberates Afghanistan and opium production resumes. After
harvest season expect a flood of opium and heroin into the US.
Thanks to Bush, and his phoney perpetual wars against unseen enemies,
there will be ample supply of heroin for your youth, America. Wake
up.)
Study: Afghans Growing Opium Poppy
By VANESSA GERA
Associated Press Writer
February 28, 2002, 6:43 PM EST
VIENNA, Austria -- The opium poppy harvest in Afghanistan this year is
likely to return to levels seen before the ousted Taliban banned the
crop, the United Nations reported Thursday.
The Taliban, driven from power by the U.S.-led war against terrorism,
banned poppy production in July 2000. Officials said that last year,
farmers in Taliban-controlled territory reaped only 200 tons of poppy,
from which both opium and heroin are derived. That was down from 3,300
tons the year before.
The crop was sown in November in formerly Taliban-controlled regions in
the south and west of the country. The Taliban grip on power was nearly
non-existent then under the pressure of U.S. bombing. Farmers went back
to their traditional ways and the U.N. report forecasts a harvest of
1,900 and 2,700 tons this year.
By early February, observers from the U.N. International Drug Control
Program saw small green poppy plants breaking through the soil in areas
that accounted for 84 percent of the total cultivation in 2000.
Northern Afghanistan was excluded from the survey because the colder
climate there usually delays planting.
Many poor Afghan farmers cannot resist planting poppy because of the
profit to be had, said Sumru Noyan of the UNDCP.
In Helmand province in the southwest, some farmers plowed under
germinating wheat in January to replant with poppy, the U.N. report said.
It claimed fields associated with some villages were 70 percent under
poppy cultivation.
Steinar Bjornsson, interim head of the U.N. Office for Drug Control and
Crime Prevention, said curtailing poppy production in Afghanistan was
crucial to the recovery of the impoverished, war-ravaged country. After
malnutrition, he said, drugs pose the most serious challenge to future
stability because they fund terrorism.
"The U.N. is trying to rebuild the country in perhaps its most
complex undertaking ever," he said.
The UNDCP is helping the interim Afghan government of Prime Minister
Hamid Karzai set up legal structures and law enforcement agencies that
will help authorities fight the production of drugs.
Karzai's U.N.-brokered government announced a ban on poppy production
last month, after many fields had already been sown.
The bulk of the heroin and opium derived from Afghan poppy is transported
by smugglers to Western Europe through Iran, Turkey and the Balkans,
Noyan said.
Copyright � 2002, The Associated Press
-end article-\
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-InfoWarz
"Heroin, the choice for children not on government mandated
Ritalin."
-Uncle Samuel
