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United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime published a comprehensive report about drug production and cultivation in Afghanistan. Afghanistan currently exports the largest amount of heroin in the world.
The report notes that the amount of opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan steadily increased throughout 2017, which is necessary for increasing heroin production. Thousands of production laboratories produce heroin in Afghanistan.
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The chart below show that the Taliban tried to curb the drug production in Afghanistan, as a way to earn international recognition, with record low of only 8 thousand hectares of opium poppy fields in 2001. After the foreign intervention, ensuing 16 years show incredible rise of opium poppy cultivation to estimated 328 thousand hectares. The US’s “fight against drugs” is either woefully inefficient, or deliberately so.
This chart demonstrates the cost of opium in Kandahar and Nangarhar provinces. The graph peaks in 2001, corresponding with Taliban’s attempts of fighting drug production. After the foreign intervention, opium prices started to go down.
The new overall rise of production and cultivation corresponds with the further deteoration of the security situation is Afghanistan despite the increased presence of the US-led coalition in the country.
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ask Stoltenberg how good the harvest
Well Pentagon and the CIA has to get the money from some place, for all those illegal wars and black ops in the ME , Ukraine and elsewhere across the globe. I guess all those TOW missiles in Syria ain’t for free …
Here in America, we have opioid epidemic. Keep the people preoccupied and stupid to control them. In time, there will be a second revolution here. The atrocities committed to the Middle Class in particular will not be tolerated any longer.
Get on with it and you will find a good percentage of Europe joining as well. Actually we have started but politically only.
Considering the opioid epidemic, you would think poppy farmers in Afghanistan would be some of the richest farmers on earth. Unfortunately, just like the CIA coca farmers in Central America, they are some of the most impoverished in the world. They both have to moonlight as raw opium/coca mules just to afford to grow the crops. Worse yet, they can’t even afford drugs to dull their senses or give them a pick-up during work. Those guys really need to form a farmer’s union and hire a slick Madison Av. advertising firm to market their all-organic fair-trade GMO-free botanical extracts direct to the consumer (Bitcoins accepted).
OMG who would have guessed that overthrowing the Taliban using heroin dealers would result in an uptick in heroin being dealt?
USA drug dealers are doing very well their work after taking over Afganistan.