At 8:07 AM -0700 24/2/09, Chris Gehlker wrote:
>On Feb 24, 2009, at 6:53 AM, David Cake wrote:
>
>>> We need to recognize inelastic demand. Every initial success we have
>>> against the Taliban simply drives up the price of opiates and
>>> channels
>>> more resources to them.
>>>
>>> The US has only one strategy for defeating the Taliban and that
>>> involves greatly increasing the output of the legal poppy farms in
>>> California and flooding North America and Europe with high quality
>>> cheap or free heroin. We don't seem to have the political will to do
>>> this.
>>
>> There is an alternative. We could start buying Afghani
>> poppies for legal opiates. Pay more than the Taliban does to Afghani
>> growers. It is not as if there is no legitimate market for opiates.
>
>This is silly. I have seen the small farm in California that produces
>all the legal opium used in North America.
Surely some mistake. I've seen the pretty
large farms in Tasmania that produces a lot of
Australias opium, and we are a much smaller
country. And actually, the US is nowhere near
self sufficient in opium, apparently, but instead
buys 80 percent of its medicinal opium from India
and Turkey. The things you can find on wikipedia.
The amount of legal opiates consumed is
basically much bigger than the amount of illegal
ones. Codeine is produced from morphine, which is
produced from opium, and codeine is absurdly
common, being in over the counter painkillers -
about an order of magnitude more than morphine.
You may be getting confused about
production itself, and production of
morphine/codeine, which is the primary form of
production of opiates from opium poppies.
Actually, what I learned from wikipedia
is that the idea of buying Afghanistans opium for
licit use, for much the same reasons I mentioned,
is under active consideration
>From wikiepdia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_poppy
>A recent initiative to extend opium production
>for medicinal purposes called Poppy for Medicine
>was launched by The Senlis Council which
>proposes that Afghanistan could produce
>medicinal opium under a scheme similar to that
>operating in Turkey and India (see the Council's
>recent report "Poppy for Medicine" [1]). The
>Council proposes licensing poppy production in
>Afghanistan, within an integrated control system
>supported by the Afghan government and its
>international allies, in order to promote
>economic growth in the country, create vital
>drugs and combat poverty and the diversion of
>illegal opium to drug traffickers and terrorist
>elements. Interestingly, Senlis is on record
>advocating reintroduction of poppy into areas of
>Afghanistan, specifically Kunduz, which has been
>poppy free for some time.
The next paragraph does say that there is an
argument that the worlds supply of medicinal
opium is already too high, and so the scheme is
flawed, which I guess is basically your argument
(even if you argue from an incorrect premise -
that domestic production is adequate) -
>From wikiepdia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_poppy
>The Senlis proposal is based in part on the
>assertion that there is an acute global shortage
>of opium poppy-based medicines some of which
>(morphine) are on the World Health
>Organisation's list of essential drugs as they
>are the most effective way of relieving severe
>pain. This assertion is contradicted by the
>International Narcotics Control Board (INCB),
>the "independent and quasi-judicial control
>organ monitoring the implementation of the
>United Nations drug control conventions"
>http://www.incb.org/. INCB reports that the
>supply of opiates is greatly in excess of
>demand. [8] For a longer analysis of this
>discussion see Chouvy, Pierre-Arnaud, "Licensing
>Afghanistan's opium: solution or fallacy?"
>Caucasian Review of International Affairs, Vol.
>2 (2) - Spring 2008. <www.geopium.org> and
>Grare, Frédéric. Anatomy of a Fallacy: The
>Senlis Council and Narcotics in Afghanistan.
>Working Paper Number 34, The Centre for
>International Governance Innovation. February
>2008. http://www.cigionline.org/
I don't really buy this argument, though, as
currently opium based legal pain killers are used
mostly (77%?) by 6 countries (Australia, UK, US,
France, Canada, Germany) so there is presumably
plenty of potential for increased medicinal use
in the rest of the world. In any case, it could
probably be stockpiled, and farmers moved onto
other crops later.
Back to your argument -
1) so do you have any actual evidence that price
is so elastic, and demand so constant, that
reducing cost simply drives up the price
equivalently, or do you just imagine that this is
so?
2) and really, your alternative suggestion is
that California starts flooding Europe with
illegal heroin? This is your bright idea?
> Unless we supply addicts we
>do nothing to reduce the demand for Afghan poppies.
Ultimately, we don't really care about
the demand for poppies or illicit opium - we just
care that it finances the Taliban. If we buy the
local production, the Taliban doesn't have it,
they don't sell it.
But sure - if it makes you feel happier,
assume that we convert poppies bought from the
Taliban into methadone that we give to addicts,
or similar, thus reducing demand for illicit
opium.
> >
>>
>>> Fortunately, we don't need to defeat the Taliban. We just need to
>>> reach an accommodation with then where they stop providing sanctuary
>>> to as-Qaeda. Obama's people and many in the military and even
>>> conservative politicians versed in foreign policy seem to get this.
>>
>> That would be a morally bankrupt strategy - but also,
>> unlikely to really succeed.
>
>Shockingly, David Cake becomes more of a war monger than David Patraeus:
><http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/08/terror/main4511185.shtml>
Not really - I said it would be morally
bankrupt to simply make an accomodation with them
about al-Qaeda, and ignore all other issues. We
certainly should be willing to negotiate with
them, particularly is we can negotiate with
individual Taliban warlords directly not via
Mullah Omar and his band of clerical loons -- but
other issues than just terrorist training camps
alone, such as a cessation of military action,
human rights, etc will have to be on the table as
well. Which is nowhere contradicted by that
article at all.
>We know nothing about you personal history. Maybe you served bravely
>in Afghanistan. I really hope you aren't imposing a moral standard
>that you are not willing to live up to yourself.
Well, I'm unwilling to engage in that
level of gratuitous misrepresentation of news
items for personal attack, so surely that says
something about my moral standards relative to
others, right?
And really, Chris, you are getting on a
soapbox about moral standards when your proposal
is that the US should start deliberately
trafficking heroin in Western Europe? Really?
Take a step back and listen to how that sounds.
Cheers
David
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