Enough Already -- Stop Funding the Taliban Through Opium Prohibition

Enough Already -- Stop Funding the Taliban Through Opium Prohibition
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/507/stop_funding_the_taliban_through_opium_prohibition

David Borden, Executive Director

The drug war is in part a human rights issue. With half a million people in prison for nonviolent drug offenses, with medical mar1juana providers being hounded by the authorities, with needle exchange programs that are needed to save lives getting blocked, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy itself opposing San Francisco's proposed safe injection site (when did it become wrong to save lives?), with countries pressured by us to spray their lands with harmful chemicals to attack unstoppable drug crops, the United States through its drug policy has become a major human rights violator. It is a sad chapter.

We at DRCNet partly see drug reform as a human rights movement, and so ten years ago when very few Americans had heard of the Taliban, but the UN and the Clinton administration intended to fund them to do opium eradication, we condemned the Taliban in this newsletter and criticized the proposal. The fear of human rights advocates was that the brutal regime would be able to use the money to further establish its hold on power. Anyone who watched the footage of Taliban atrocities airing on US news stations after 9/11 can understand why that's a bad thing. Other reasons for opposing the Taliban are quite well known now.

Today we continue to fund the Taliban -- we don't say we do, we claim to be fighting them, we even send our soldiers to fight them in person -- but we are funding them. We are funding them by prohibiting drugs. Because drugs are illegal, they cannot be regulated, and so their source plants are grown wherever and by whomever is willing and able to gain a foothold in the market. For a large share of the global opium supply, at the moment that means Afghanistan. And the Taliban are cashing in on that.

And how. Just this week, a NATO commander said opium may provide as much as 40% of the Taliban's revenues, hundreds of millions of dollars -- some experts say it's more like 60%, he added. If opium-derived drugs were legal and regulated, that wouldn't happen. And governments are therefore at fault for creating a funding source for a movement that is destabilizing Afghanistan, that is abusing the rights of its people, and that may still be helping Al-Qaeda, all of this five years after we thought we had gotten rid of them for good.

US officials continue to press for more opium eradication, but experts agree that eradication helps the Taliban too, by driving the farmers into their arms -- of course while failing to reduce the opium crop, instead only moving it from place to place. And while Afghanistan's government has not unleashed all the eradication the US government wants, it has done enough to hurt. A hundred thousand Afghans are employed in the opium trade and don't have another way to make a living. We can't just tell them they can't grow opium anymore, and expect them to comply or that serious damage to the nation-building and counter-insurgency programs won't result.

Ten years ago, the west helped the Taliban for the sake of fighting the drug war. Today, the Taliban is an enemy, and we fight the drug war supposedly to fight them, but in the process instead help them -- see how no matter what direction the drug war compass points, one way or its opposite, it never points to anywhere good. That is why I say, enough already, stop funding the Taliban and other dangerous people through drug prohibition, legalize drugs to make this world a safer place.

 

If you were to ban "propaganda" sites, you would similarly have to ban links to the ONDCP website.

I note that you have never been able to comment on the substance of any article I have posted regarding the drug war, much less my analysis or comments on the same topic.

Keep attacking the source as these attacks prove that you have no substantive arguments on the subject.

 

Really? The world that I want to live in is one in which children find it between difficult and impossible to acquire drugs, drug overdoses are a thing of the past, and jail cells are reserved for violent and predatory criminals. In addition, the system I would create would ACTUALLY reduce drug abuse and would minimize the harms that drug use and abuse have on our society.

I guess the world you want to live in has drugs available to any schoolchild, sees a half million people in jail for nonviolent offenses, arrests 750,000 people a year for mar1juana possession (not dealing, simple possession, per FBI statistics from 2006), and exacerbates every harm that drug use and abuse has on our society on top of creating harms that would not exist in the absence of prohibition.

 

If you look at statistics over the course of the last decade, you will see that since the "We Card" programs started in the early to mid-90s, tobacco availability to young people has dropped by 25% and alcohol availability dropped by 50%. A recent study found that young people find it easier to acquire illegal drugs than alcohol.

A recent study was also done that compared drug usage levels between Amsterdam and San Francisco and it found that adult rates of mar1juana use showed statistically insignificant differences between the two cities while teenage usage in Amsterdam was half the rate in SF.

Yes, I believe that we can create a system of regulation that allows adults to purchase what they like and reduces the access that young people have to drugs. You can deride my view as "Utopian," but statistics and hard data tend to back up my assertions.

 

Here is one...

Regulated mar1juana Sales in the Netherlands
Since 1976, the cultivation, sale, and possession of small amounts of mar1juana have been officially tolerated by the government of the Netherlands. While technically illegal, a written policy of “tolerance” has permitted hundreds of retail mar1juana businesses (“coffee shops”) to operate with impunity. The anti-mar1juana laws are only enforced against those creating a nuisance or violating quantity limits. Sales of hard drugs and sales to minors are strictly forbidden.

As in the U.S., Dutch mar1juana use rates have risen and fallen in the last 30 years. Overall, though, mar1juana use rates in the Netherlands remain dramatically lower than in the U.S. The latest Dutch government figures,
from 2001, show that 17% of Netherlands residents age 12 and up have ever used mar1juana.9 In contrast, 40.1% of Americans aged 12 and up have used mar1juana.10

A detailed comparison of youth mar1juana use rates in the Netherlands and the U.S. appears in Section II.

http://www.medicalmarijuanaprocon.org/pdf/TeenUseReport.pdf

This is a gathering of statistics that shows that teen mar1juana use is half what we see here in the states.



The following link is the study that shows that criminalization has no net effect on rates of drug use, citing the similar usage rates in Amsterdam and San Francisco...

http://www.ajph.org/cgi/content/ful...INDEX=0&sortspec=relevance&resourcetype=HWCIT



Next up, the data that showed that illegal drugs are easier for teens to acquire than alcohol...

More than one-third of teens polled by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse said they could buy mar1juana in just a few hours, 27 percent in an hour or less.

For the first time since the study began in 1996, mar1juana edged out cigarettes and beer as the easiest drug for teenagers to buy -- 34 percent said it's the easiest of the three, compared with 31 percent for cigarettes and 14 percent for beer.


This was in 2002 and was pulled directly out of the government's data.