-Caveat Lector-
http://www.economist.com/world/africa/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1034972
What the Taliban banned
Mar 14th 2002 | ZAHEDAN
From The Economist print edition
With the Taliban toppled, Afghan
opium is flooding Iran
Get article background
FROM the point of view of their
Iranian neighbours, the Taliban did two good
things. Their leader, Mullah Omar,
banned the cultivation of opium poppies,
and he enforced that ban brutally.
Iran's leaders much prefer Afghanistan's
new interim prime minister, Hamid
Karzai, to his iron-fisted predecessor, but
wish he was tougher on drugs.
Although Mr Karzai has banned both
poppy-growing and drug-trafficking,
he cannot stop the trade.
What the Afghans grow, Iranians
smoke or inject. At least 2m Iranians are
addicted to opium and its
derivatives, morphine and heroin. Mr Omar's ban
may have been a cynical ploy to win
diplomatic recognition, but it caused
production to plummet and the price
of opium to quadruple in a few months.
Impoverished Iranian addicts
suddenly applied in record numbers for help in
kicking the habit. Overcoming its
revulsion for the Taliban, Iran sent experts
to Helmand, Afghanistan's main
poppy-producing province, to encourage
farmers to grow other crops.
All this happened at a time when
Iran's domestic drugs policy was becoming
more open and effective. Muhammad
Falah, the man in charge, encouraged
non-governmental organisations to
set up rehabilitation clinics, spoke out
against the mass imprisonment of
drug addicts, and even argued for the
distribution of clean syringes in
jails. Such ideas were unthinkable in the bad
old days, when the government's aim
was to disguise the problem.
America attacked Afghanistan last
year at poppy-planting time. Farmers in
Helmand took advantage of the
Taliban's disarray to sow 35,000 hectares
(86,000 acres) with poppies and the
UN expects this year's harvest to be
almost as bountiful as the bumper
years of the late 1990s. The local warlords,
who probably profit from the trade,
pay little heed to Mr Karzai or his police.
Poppies sprout fast: a first crop
will be harvested by the end of April; a
second will be ready in June.
Iran has strengthened security
along a border already crawling with soldiers
and paralleled by immense trenches,
impassable even by a self-navigating
camel with a bellyful of drugs. In
two weeks earlier this year, the security
forces in the border province of
Sistan-Baluchistan seized six tons of drugs
and killed, they say, 90 smugglers.
Mehdi Morassaie, the province's
anti-drugs supremo, hopes to keep
prices high. In the main market in
Zahedan, the provincial capital,
opium is still relatively expensive, at $750 a
kilo. But in Tehran, where the
stuff usually costs far more, the price has fallen
from $2,000 a kilo last November to
around $1,300. After the harvest, prices
will surely fall further.
Iran's leaders are understandably
frustrated. After helping bring Mr Karzai to
power, they now have less influence
over the Afghan drug industry than
before. Muhammad Khatami, Iran's
president, says he wants to carry on
helping with crop substitution, but
the warlords of southern Afghanistan are
not interested. Nor is America. An
Iranian official laments that America's new
chumminess with Afghan warlords may
preclude a serious effort to crush the
trade on which they depend.
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