Not really. BBC reporting from yesterday: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55048147 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55048147 [..] Afghanistan, home to th

Not really. BBC reporting from yesterday: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55048147 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55048147 [..] Afghanistan, home to the heroin trade, moves into meth A new report released on Tuesday warns that Afghanistan is becoming a significant global producer of methamphetamine. The country's opium poppy fields are already the source of the majority of the world's heroin, and now this report, by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), warns that crystal meth could eventually become just as big an industry. The boom is the result of a discovery by drug traffickers that a plant commonly found growing wild in parts of Afghanistan, ephedra, can be used to create the key component of meth: ephedrine. "The realisation that you could produce methamphetamine from a wild crop in the mountains has been a fundamental gamechanger," said Dr David Mansfield, an expert on Afghanistan's drug industry and lead author of the report. [..] The team discovered that methamphetamine production was a "two-tiered process", with ephedrine relatively easy to make even for people in poor households, who then sell it on to more specialised "meth cooks". The researchers were able to identify the images of ephedrine labs through the large quantities of waste water and dried ephedra crops left over from the process and dumped outside the buildings. [..]