When the Taliban were in Kabul before the West’s invasion, opium production there was at around 100 tonnes per year. Right now Afghan opium yields are over 8,000 tonnes per year; that’s a neatly calculable jump of 8,000%!

Opium farmers in the remote areas of Burma hardly get a look-in on the global heroin market nowadays. And yep, Burma’s nationalist junta is vilified in the West as the bad guys, prompted by the successes the Burmese Army have had defending their sovereignty against the "Opium War" strategy and its overarching Globalization empire.

Not so on the Afghan front, however: the world smack trade is now around 90% Afghan-supplied (I recall recent sources claimed 92% and 97%). But why discriminate against "Afghan" involvement, usually such low-rung operators? We mustn’t forget the valuable protection and "mentoring" offered by western armies to such free trade. Around 80% of opium production is in Helmand, Nimroz, Farah, Uruzgan and Kandahar provinces, predominantly patrolled by Commonwealth troops. The warlords running these programs have a free rein.

On a huge scale of money laundering, Afghan opium is now valued by corrupt (mostly western) financiers as an essential part of their hedge and equity fund rackets. At least 5% of funds derives from the illicit drug trade, as one of the few remaining "real" commodities in the globalized "free trade" finance sector; the rest mostly compromises toxic derivatives garbage of glorified and massively bailed-out debt.

Any military operations for international stability and security should start with raids against the usurers' criminal havens in such imperial finance centers as: the Cayman Is., Isle of Man, Dutch Antilles, Antigua, the Channel Is., and Amsterdam and the City of London itself.

Mil-observer,

By all means let's invade the Cayman Islands, etc.

Then again we could simply decriminalise the use of heroin, cocaine, cannabis etc and give junkies the drug of their choice on prescription free of charge. The drugs would be sourced from carefully controlled state-owned greenhouses.

The dealing of drugs would still be illegal; however as the profit would be gone – the dealers could not compete with free drugs from the government. Those involved in the supply of illegal narcotics would have to find some other way to make a buck.

Let's face it. Prohibitions never work. The so-called "war on drugs" is farcical. It does more harm than good. There is no "military solution" to this issue.

I have reached the stage where I suspect anyone who wants to continue the so-called "war on drugs" of being either stupid, a self-righteous prick, in the pay of the drug suppliers or a combination of all three.

mil-observer

Your cross post was excellent. Thanks, and fully agree.

My comments above were gender based, but my intent was to raise awareness about how ordinary people keep war alive for reasons within ourselves that, as a society, we still don't seem to want to analyse or even confront.

Anti-war criticism tends to focus on the warmongering of the powerful and treats ordinary people as unwitting victims. Yet, our leaders would not keep involving us in war after war if there weren't so many eager young warriors to fight them.

Confronting male masochism - particularly the type found in the song 'The band played WM' - is an absoute taboo, but until we confront it as a society, we will continue to be trapped in endless war.

Oops ... sorry. I posted to the wrong discussion. My above comment was meant for the thread 'Some Anzac Day songs'.

Drugs destroy people - as individuals and as communities. Legalizing drugs merely destroys more people via normalization/destigmatization, widening access and lowering prices. Youth in particular are most vulnerable to the addictive poisons. Even pro-legalization hacks concede that legalization would raise the number of addicts, as expressed in that infamous March 2009 issue of The Economist.

Of course, none of that should surprise, because history teaches us that it has happened before. British, Dutch and French imperialists all issued dealers' licences for opium since the 19th century, while the British fed ganja to many of their Indian coolies. The consistent point of such policies was to create a passive, dependent and apathetic population, while boosting profits via addictive commodities. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx applauded the rise of opium as an openly traded commodity; Marx even claimed that opium trade broke through some stereotypical "oriental despotism" in China.

It is well known that the British Empire used opium to destroy China before, during and after the two "Opium Wars" of the mid-19th century. Having ransacked and plundered China under the leadership of Gordon (later killed in Sudan by a resistance which today's imperialists would label "terrorists" and "human rights abusers"), the Empire forced the Qing Dynasty to permit and support opium dealing throughout the entire country. In fact, the ensuing social devastation and corruption left scars that severely impaired the modernization of China and the health of the Chinese people.

Where not corrupted and perverted by the duplicity of liberalist whore-politicians, the War on Drugs is one of the few "just wars" going.

So pass the ammunition. But the priority targets must be the narcotic industry's big profit makers; as I explained before, the Cayman Islands is just one of the major drug dealers' many money-laundering centers.

[SJF: Np. Reply and original thread @ http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8819&page=0 ]

mill-observer.
Why then do the countries with the most fervent anti-drugs policy have the most addicts and the most corruption?
Why were drugs not a problem in Western cultures until prohibition?
About 75% of crime is drugs related. Is stopping a few phyconauts *really* worth the violence, crime and expense?
There are many beneficiaries from prohibition, but mostly they are the criminal gangs, the criminal financiers...basically the same cast of characters that profit from war.
You give yourself away with the "liberalist whore-politicians" line.
True, more Right wingers make money from drugs and hence want the prohibition to continue...but attacking people for a desire for freedom? This is like calling "virtue" a bad thing! (Also common from Right: "Do gooders!")
I'd just like my police to have time for real crime.
stevenlmeyer has it right: War does more harm than good...unless you put no value on human freedom and human lives and think it is virtuous to curtail people's freedoms.
Why is the press not particularly worried that the "good war" in Afghanistan has had the effect of massive increase in heroin? Why no mention of the gas pipeline? War, like drugs appears to be too profitable for humans to deal honestly. Remove the profit and the lies and perhaps peace has a chance.
BTW. We clearly "forgot" the ANZAC lesson, having repeated it in Iraq. Killing for politics is evil. Only defense of the homeland justifies state sponsored killing.