Posted on 06/27/2009 1:55:44 PM PDT by newbie2008
The United States is to change the way it deals with the massive poppy growing industry in Afghanistan. Instead of destroying the crops it will spend money encouraging Afghan farmers to grow different ones. US special envoy to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke, at a G8 meeting in Italy, said current measures against poppy growers had been "a failure". The conference of foreign ministers in Trieste also called for credible elections in Afghanistan in August. Mr Holbrooke said that existing programmes of eradication had not reduced by one dollar the amount of money the Taliban earned from production. "Spraying the crops just penalises the farmer and they grow crops somewhere else. The hundreds of millions of dollars we spend on crop eradication has not had any damage on the Taliban."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
Great! BHO is going to spike the numbers of the world’s heroin addicts as well...
If he had any sense he could lock up the market at a fair price for sale to pharmaceutical makers for the drugs they make out of opium.
Our own pharma co’s are doing that on their own.
“it will spend money encouraging Afghan farmers to grow different ones.”
Ahh. The ol’ “we will pay the $#!t out of you” strategy. Has this ever worked in the history of warfare? Are we going to fail to impose our will in Afghanistan also?
There’s too much money to be made on Afgani heroin. Today in Kabul prices for a kilo of heroin are as little as $1000.
The hard part is getting it out of the country to somewhere like NY or Great Britain where it can be sold for somewhere between $50,000 to $80,000 per kilo.
Right now heroin is more precious than gold something Asian governments are only too aware of as they continue to sentence heroin smugglers to life in prison or even death.
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