http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3309/why-dont-we-bomb-afghanistans-poppy-fields
Why is Afghanistan such a good place to grow opium poppies? Couldn’t they be grown almost anywhere? For awhile heroin from the "Golden Triangle"of northern Thailand/Burma was a thing, but why does Afghanistan continue to be the place to produce opium? Why not South America for example?
If I had to guess, I’d go with complete or near-complete lack of any local or regional authority to stop it; a good case could be made that they [del]probably[/del] may even encourage it, or at least look the other way.
The topography helps provide nice secluded spots. The US joined forces with Thailand to end the poppy production. Mostly successfully. But then there was not a horrid war going on there at the time.
Seems to me there is a white elephant in the room, and it isn’t the heroin. It doesn’t matter what we do; as long as the drug trade remains lucrative, people will continue participating in it. The only answer is to make the drug trade less lucrative. There are two ways to do that: one, drive up costs to a prohibitive level, or two, reduce profits from it.
Driving up costs, which is what raids and burns and whatnot is attempting to do, has been an utter failure. We simply cannot make enough of a dent from half a world away to make a difference. So then we come to reducing profits. How do we do that? We can try to reduce demand, which, ha! That’s never going to happen. Or we can increase the competition by legalizing the drug, driving down costs through market forces.
Legalization would have a lot of benefits, and basically zero drawbacks. It gets government out of the business of telling people what to do with their bodies, always a good thing. It enables government to stop spending money on trying to enforce laws that tell people what to do with their own bodies – again, always a good thing. It reduces the cost of the drugs for the people who want them. And it takes money away from the criminals who are the only ones currently supplying the drugs. In case you weren’t tallying, that is a win win win win situation.
The downside? Nothing beyond the hand-wringing of the morally righteous over the wrong type of drug now being legal. Alcohol and tobacco, those are fine, but anything else is right out.
I agree that legalization would have benefits, but there are some serious drawbacks.
Let’s start with marijuana. We just need to stick the seed in the ground in Spring; water, fertilize, weeding; then in Fall we harvest and store. What could go wrong? Tobacco has only the added step of having to cure for a year, but simple as pie. Alcoholic beverages are somewhat trickier and there are some things to be careful of to reduce contamination. However, we’ll be able to taste spoiled beer or vinegared wine fairly quickly. Well established care in the storing process is important.
Now, with the chemical drugs; heroin, cocaine, meth; we’re in a whole different scale of problems. This is organic chemistry and there are many many things that could go wrong. Ether and light switches are an explosive combination. Purifying the product from the reaction is an expensive painstaking process. The waste products tend to go down the drain into the sewage treatment facilities, and eventually to our waterways.
We’re perfectly safe telling people they can grow their own pot. Telling people they can cook their own meth … phaw … that’s nothing but trouble. What can be done with Ecstasy is frightening …
Is the Government telling us what we can put in our bodies … or have We the People demanded the Government establish pure food and drug laws? Even the Snake Oil Protection Act requires sellers to say it’s snake oil …
You seem to have made an odd assumption that “legalization” equals “completely unregulated.” Tobacco is legal, and it is perfectly legal to grow and consume your own tobacco. Alcohol is legal, yet it is very illegal to distill your own alcohol without a permit.
Opium is the cash crop of the Taliban and the money is funding the Taliban’s war against the United States. The Taliban gets an estimated 40% of its funding from opium. Seems to me that allowing poppy growing to fight the Taliban is a mite counterproductive.
But why aren’t other regions around the world getting in on poppy growing?
Because it brings with it innumerable social ills, is why!
Producing beer and wine at home is legal for personal consumption, which are the examples I used in my post. However, I was expanding on the assumption that making moonshine was legal. Such that one could go to the store and buy a proper and safe still without the hassle of registering it with BATFE. That same as being able to go buy 10 cases of [deleted due to SBMB rules] and whip up a batch of meth.
The only downside of legalizing moonshine is the loss of tax revenue*. The downside of legalizing meth would be a list too long to post here.
I’m not sure how much of a producer Thailand ever was. From what I know, there was generally a division of labor – Burma grew, Laos processed and Thailand shipped it. That’s not hard and fast – I lived in northern Thailand for two years in the 1980s, and certainly there were hilltribes growing the stuff. But production was nowhere near on the scale of Burma just across the border.