There's a way to end Afghanistan's and the world's pain
John Polanyi, Op-Ed Contributer
The Globe and Mail, 23 September 2006
In his address to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper stressed the historic importance of the UN-sponsored intervention in Afghanistan. The rich have conspicuously come to the aid of the poor in the common interest. Calling it the UN's “greatest test,” Mr. Harper said, “we cannot afford to fail.” He then warned that “we haven't made Afghanistan's progress irreversible. Not yet.”
The gravest danger to this important project is that the foreign forces in Afghanistan come to be regarded not as saviours, but as invaders. One reason that this may happen has yet to receive proper attention. It lies in the aggressive poppy-eradication program promoted by the United States.
In addition to being ineffective, this program alienates the population and materially assists the Taliban. It is, moreover, the wrong policy, given the global shortage of essential painkillers — morphine and codeine — that are obtained from opium. The poppies are needed and, if properly regulated, could provide a legal source of income to impoverished Afghan farmers while, at the same time, depriving the drug lords and the Taliban of much of their income.
This argument has been made by The Senlis Council, a think tank with offices in London, Paris and Kabul that specializes in security studies and global drug policy.
But we don't need The Senlis Council to tell us that crop eradication is a failure. Earlier this month, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime reported that, despite years of sustained efforts to abolish it, the poppy crop in Afghanistan increased by nearly 60 per cent in the past year.
The situation is worse in the south, where Canadian troops are operating. There, cultivation more than doubled.
The illegal drug trade, estimated by the UN at $2.7-billion per year and constituting more than one-third of Afghanistan's gross domestic product, threatens to drive the country inexorably from a narco-economy to a narco-state. In the narco-state, power will have moved from elected leaders to drug lords and their Taliban allies. This will spell death for democracy.
There is no disagreement about this. The disagreement has to do with the best means of solving the problem. The current policy of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United States seeks to destroy poppy crops and punish the farmers.
The Senlis Council (in co-operation with specialists in opiates and their regulation, working at the Universities of Calgary and Toronto) offers an alternative aimed at legalized, regulated poppy production in Afghanistan to supply the developing world with needed painkillers.
(By 2015, the World Health Organization estimates there will be 10 million cancer cases per year in the developing countries, in addition to the millions of cases of HIV/AIDS. The WHO describes the expected demand for opium-based medicines as a “world pain crisis.”)
Traffic in morphine and codeine is licensed by the International Narcotics Control Board. The INCB points out that the richest nations (the United States, United Kingdom, France, Japan, Germany, Australia and Canada) consume nearly all of the world's opiates, leaving 80 per cent of the globe's population virtually without.
Could opiates made from Afghan poppies make up the shortfall, if the INCB were to license growing there, as it does in France, India and Turkey? Undoubtedly. Meeting the global demand for pain medication has been estimated to require about double the current Afghan production. Maia Szalavitz, a senior fellow at Stats, a media watchdog group, has estimated the cost of buying the entire Afghan poppy crop at the current market price, set today by Afghan drug lords, as about $600-million — less than the $780-million the United States budgeted last year for eradication.
It's important to remember that buying poppies for legal use sends a different message to the Afghan people than destroying their livelihood to prevent illegal use. Legal traffic is, at once, more profitable for farmers, who need no longer buy protection. It is hugely more profitable in the long run, since it allows citizens to share in the benefits of a stable, law-based society — the very thing that we, our NATO allies, and the elected government of Afghanistan, are seeking to achieve.
Moving to this new regime of lawful poppy and opiate production causes difficulties. Not because the international community would be required to legalize any substance not currently legal, but because it must agree to extend the privilege of legal production to a jurisdiction accustomed, till now, only to the illegal.
Not to do this, however, would represent a culpable failure of imagination on our part, in which we condemned the poor of rural Afghanistan to crime because we regard this as their proper state.
The intervention in Afghanistan required courage and far-sightedness on the part of the international community. Its success will depend on our exercising those same qualities in the wider context of extending to Afghanistan the benefits of regulated poppy farming that other nations presently enjoy.
John Polanyi is a Nobel laureate and member of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Toronto.
John Charles Polanyi is a Nobel Prize-winning Canadian chemist. Polanyi studied at the University of Manchester, UK, achieving his doctorate in 1952. After a role at the National Research Council of Canada, Polanyi started work at the University of Toronto, where he has been a university professor since 1974.
In 1974 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and was promoted to Companion in 1979. In 1986, Polanyi won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with Yuan T. Lee and Dudley R. Herschbach "for their contributions concerning the dynamics of chemical elementary processes."
Polanyi has been a member of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada since July 1st 1992 and has been involved for more than forty years in international political campaigns including armament control and peacekeeping.
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