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How Do Afghan Drug Lords Spend All That Loot?
- jsonscripter 17y agoI wish they would just firebomb the poppy fields and get it over with. What would be wrong with that? They've been saying they would for years but always decide to 'wait a little longer' and never do anything.
- riffic 17y agoNooo! Leave my poppy seed bagels out of this
- martincmartin 17y agoThey would take away the livelihoods of a large number of farmers. From an Afgan farmer's position, when there are these foreign troops with strange customs and behavior that you don't really understand or like, and then they destroy all your crops and leave you and your family to starve, it tends to turn you against them. And when you have a lot of anger and time on your hands, some will decide to take up arms against the troops instead.
- m_eiman 17y agoA better solution would be to just pay the farmers more than they get for the poppy to produce something else instead. With some basic sanity checks on the amount of stuff they produce the inevitable cheating of the system should be somewhat manageable. It might not be very cheap, but neither is handling the effects of drug-based crime at home or posting troops abroad.
- sharpn 17y agoI heard saffron could be a viable alternative cash crop.
- riffic 17y agountil people figure out how to get high on saffron instead.
- hughprime 17y agoSounds a bit unfair to all the saffron farmers in other countries. With half the land in Afghanistan suddenly devoted to saffron production, the value of saffron will plummet. Meanwhile, Afghan saffron farmers will be selling their saffron to the US government for some insane price. If I were a foreign saffron farmer I'd be pretty pissed off. Oh, and the number one saffron producer at the moment is Iran, so you'd probably get a vast industry in smuggling Iranian saffron across the border to be sold in Afghanistan. Oh, and also the drop in opium production will raise opium prices, and so you'll need to keep raising the Afghanistan saffron buying price in order to keep it more attractive than opium farming. I foresee all sorts of unforeseen consequences, and those are just the foreseen ones!
- sharpn 17y agoI agree with the problems you mention, and the likely unintended effects. My point was that it might be a least-worst-option alternative. I suspect there are no perfect solutions that can be imposed onto the Afghan people from outside.
- fizx 17y agoIt would be pretty sweet for us if we could convince them to grow biodiesel.
- modoc 17y agoHow about FOOD!
- aaronblohowiak 17y agoThere is no food shortage. There is a food distribution problem.
- theblackbox 17y agoThis (subsidised legal crop production) was suggested by Columbia in the eighties as a way to curb cocaine exports, the response: We don't make deals with Terrorists...
- m_eiman 17y agoFound a number on the amount of money such a scheme would require: "Although Afghanistan's overall economy is being boosted by opium profits, less than 20 percent of the $3 billion in opium profits actually goes to impoverished farmers, while more than 80 percent goes into the pockets of Afghan's opium traffickers and kingpins and their political connections." So 600 million dollars, give or take, to replace the economic incentive.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- Derrek 17y agoProbably a bad idea. Poor, angry, disenfranchised people make for great terrorism recruits.
- njhbnuyb 17y agoIf you do the firebombing properly there aren't any poor angry people left. There are only 30M people in the whole country, say 20% of them are farmers - it can't be too difficult to wipe out 6M people with some B52s, enough agent Orange and some nerve gas.
- die_sekte 17y agoWhy don't we just nuke the planet? I mean, there wouldn't be anybody left afterwards to complain and all the baddies would also be dead. You're ridiculous.
- mrtron 17y agoWhat is wrong with that? Seriously? Firebombing peasant farmers in another country - and you see nothing wrong with that? Perhaps we could accept some social and economic responsibility for dealing with the problem. Firebombing the poppy fields would be like removing all web developers hands because a website was compromised and credit card numbers stolen.
- randallsquared 17y agoI'm not in favor of firebombing anyone, but you seriously need a different analogy, since that one suggests that all the farmer's crops are being stolen from them anyway. :)
- euroclydon 17y agoThe War on (some) Drugs is so friggin' stupid! We'd be better off just doing what we can to make drug production a respectable and not so dangerous trade.
- ryanwaggoner 17y agoI don't necessarily disagree, but we already don't have a war on a long list of drugs, from caffeine to nicotine to alcohol to pharmaceuticals. You seem to feel that this list is inadequate, but that legalization of all drugs isn't the answer either, so I'd be interested to know which drugs we should no longer war against, and what the criteria is.
- roc 17y agoEven the ones that we shouldn't condone, shouldn't be opposed as we currently fight the 'war' on drugs. The war is wrongheaded and self-defeating, regardless of which currently-illegal drugs might be safely and productively legalized.
- grsxfcyt 17y agoWe could just change it every year. The increase in police will help boost the economy. At each state of the union address the pres could announce that this year Jolt and Ibuprofen are banned and you would have 24hours to consume it all before the police raids start.
- randallsquared 17y agoI think you read "War on (some) Drugs" to mean that he felt a war on other drugs was acceptable. Instead, this is meant as a way to point out the ridiculousness of the name "War on Drugs": that it isn't "drugs" we're against, but only certain unapproved drugs.
- biohacker42 17y agoThe FARC in Columbia and the war lords in Afghanistan are all rich because a bunch of baby boomers can't bare the thought of legalizing drugs. Please someone contradict me and make a more reasoned argument. I am too pissed off to think of anything better.
- patio11 17y agoPlease someone contradict me and make a more reasoned argument. The FARC sells cocaine. The Afghan warlords sell heroin. There is no constellation of American political interests for which "Legalize cocaine and heroin" is even remotely conceivable as an achievable policy option. Incidentally, no matter what you legalize, smuggling remains a viable option for whatever it is you don't. FARC could just as easily be the world's largest kiddie porn or sex slave ring. Afghanistan could sell slaves. (I am not speaking hypothetically. There are nations which do both. A willingness to do evil plus a local monopoly on coercive force makes for a very profitable combination.)
- bravura 17y agoYour argument is specious. The total addressable market for heroin and cocaine consumption is demonstrably high. Kiddie porn demand will never reach this level, and hiding a sex slave in your house is difficult.
- nandemo 17y agoFunny that you say that. In Japan there's a whole (legal) industry that would be probably classified as "kiddie porn" distribution in US. It's certainly bigger than the local cocaine and heroine market.
- biohacker42 17y agoWhat's legal in Japan creeps me out, but what's illegal in the US is often silly.
- steveplace 17y agoOr we could set up morphine processing facilities and sell the processed, medical grade, codine/morphine on the open market-- creating industry, jobs, economic devpt.. that whole schtick