Opium - The 2008 boom

Afghan opium output 'hit highs'

Opium production in Afghanistan hit "historic highs" last year, with a harvest valued at more than $4bn, more than a third of that country's gross domestic product, according to a US report on the international drugs trade.

The report says Afghanistan increased its position as the world's largest heroin producing country, with 93 per cent of world cultivation.

Russia, Afghanistan and the drug trade

Alarmed by the rise of opium cultivation in Afghanistan, Russia's Federal Drug Enforcement Service has opened a permanent office in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Federal Drug Enforcement Service Director Alexei Milovanov said of the move, “Russia advances cooperation and interaction with Afghanistan in the war on drug production and proliferation…As for the office in Kabul, our representative there will be in charge of efficient interaction between Russian and Afghani structures dealing with trafficking. With an emphasis, needless to say, on what channels lead to Russia. All of that will be carried out in close cooperation with our Central Asian colleagues.”

Milovanov also suggested that Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan establish border checkpoints and customs offices and make a joint effort to draw up an international agreement to track and confiscate drug trafficking profits (Ferghana.ru, February 20).

Russia's interest in eradicating Afghanistan's thriving drug trade is hardly academic. Not only did the Soviet Union suffer more than 20,000 fatalities and thousands more wounded while occupying Afghanistan in the 1980s, returning soldiers brought home a new problem from the war zone – drug addiction. The Afghan occupation and the ensuing years have left Russia with an estimated 4-6 million drug addicts. According to official figures, some 10,000 Russians die every year from drug overdoses and another 70,000 from drug-related health conditions (RFE/RL, January 9).

Concurrently with the Soviet occupation, Afghan opium production rose from 250 tons in 1982 to 2,000 tons in 1991. Production has now more than quadrupled, with no end in sight.

Extortion, opium fund Maoists

Poppy is cultivated on unclaimed land in Orissa, making arrests difficult

BHUBANESWAR: How do Maoists manage to fund the largescale recruitment and training of their cadres? A question which has for long perplexed Orissa police, whose morale was badly affected after Maoists recently launched a successful attack on police stations and armouries in Nayagarh.

All-out efforts are being made to learn the sources of income of Maoists, who have managed to spread their network in almost 14 districts of the state.

Intelligence sources said that Maoists have started collecting 'chandas' from mine owners in the state. This was confirmed after Jajpur police arrested dreaded Maoists Anna Reddy and his beloved from a city hospital. During the interrogation, they admitted they used to regularly collect chandas from mine owners in Kalinga Nagar areas, where Tata's steel plant is coming up. This extortion has spread to other areas too.

Iran's addicts fall victim to geography

Iran shares a long border with Afghanistan, which produces 90 per cent of the world's opium, and as much as half of that is smuggled through Iran. The country's proximity to the world's biggest opium producer has led an estimated 5m into narcotics.

Explosion in opium production since US-led invasion

Officially there are 1m drug addicts in Iran but international health workers estimate that the figure is much closer to 5m, in a country of 70m people. While much is known about the problem in neighbouring Afghanistan, and particularly about the explosion in opium production since the US-led invasion seven years ago, Iran's significant drug challenge is below the radar.

But Iran shares a long border with Afghanistan, which produces 90 per cent of the world's opium, and as much as half of that is smuggled through Iran, partly for export and partly for consumption by people such as Mr Fatehi.

Iran's addicts spend $3bn - the equivalent of 15 per cent of Iran's annual oil income - on drugs each year and their problem has led to a multitude of social ills, including an increase in HIV infections. There are about 70,000 HIV/Aids sufferers in Iran, about 60 per cent of whom were infected by sharing needles.

Police destroy opium worth millions in West Bengal

Police and narcotics officials destroyed large tracts of poppy cultivation worth millions of dollars in West Bengal on Thursday.

The operation was carried out in Amjara, Chinpai, Kendraberi, Rajnagar in the states Birbhum District.
“This year about 90-100 acres of land has been brought under opium cultivation. The officials of the excise department are carrying out the razing process,” said Pabitra Sarkar, a narcotics officer.
Farmers in the area turned to opium cultivation as it seemed to promise better returns.
Opium is mainly cultivated in the higher reaches of Himalayas but is now largely state-regulated.
India is seen as a major conduit of opium smuggling within the South Asia and Southeast Asian region.

2008 State Department Report Targets Afghan Opium, Mobile Payments Issues

The 2008 edition of the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report was released by the U.S. State Department today. As in the 2007 edition, this year's report targets the explosive growth in opium production in Afghanistan and warns of the corrosive impact on counterterrorism operations there:

"Narcotics production in Afghanistan hit historic highs in 2007 for the second straight year. Afghanistan grew 93 percent of the world's opium poppy, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Opium poppy cultivation expanded from 165,000 ha in 2006 to 193,000 ha in 2007, an increase of 17 percent in land under cultivation... The export value of this year's illicit opium harvest, $4 billion, made up more than a third of Afghanistan's combined total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $11.5 billion. Afghanistan's drug trade is undercutting efforts to establish a stable democracy with a licit economic free market in the country. The narcotics trade has strong links with the anti-government insurgency, most commonly associated with the Taliban. Narcotics traffickers provide revenue and arms to the Taliban, while the Taliban provides protection to growers and traffickers and keeps the government from interfering with their activities. During recent years, poppy production has soared in provinces where the Taliban is most active."

This year's edition includes a new section titled, "Mobile Payments--A Growing Threat":

"Unfortunately, while fighting the twin threats of money laundering and terrorist financing, we are also witnessing a plethora of new, high-tech value transfer systems that can be abused. Some of the most innovative are electronic payment products. FATF calls them “new payment methods” or NPMs. They are also sometimes called “e-money” or “digital cash.” Examples include Internet payment services, prepaid calling and credit cards, digital precious metals, electronic purses, and mobile payments or “m-payments.” Driven by a remarkable convergence of the financial and telecommunications sectors, the rapid global growth of m-payments demands particular attention. M-payments can take many forms but are commonly point of sale payments made through a mobile device such as a cellular phone, a smart phone, or a personal digital assistant (PDA)."

The section describes a typical method of moving money through m-payments:

Increasingly, in many areas, m-payments provide a new option to expatriates and “guest workers” that wish to send part of their wages home to support their families. M-payment transfers are replacing the use of traditional banks and money service businesses that historically have charged high fees for small transfers. M-payments also provide fast, safe, efficient value transfer service, which will encourage some users to bypass the use of underground remittance systems such as hawala.

Opium harvest for the NHS

Opium poppies - the raw ingredient of heroin - are being grown in the Westcountry as part of a Government-funded programme.

Dozens of fields across the country have been planted with the crop, which was a crucial source of income for the Taliban before it was toppled by British forces.

Home Office minister Vernon Coaker has refused to confirm the exact locations of the opium fields, but admitted up to six sites in Dorset are among those planted.

The poppies, from which the illegal class-A drug heroin is derived, are being used to produce legal morphine, used by the NHS to relieve pain.

Home Office figures show 206.06 hectares at sites in Dorset were used to grow opium poppies last year. It is also been grown in Wiltshire, Berkshire, Hampshire and Oxfordshire.

Anyone can grow opium poppies because the process is not controlled by the Misuse of Drugs legislation, but processing the plant to extract narcotic material can only be carried out under licence.

Every farmer growing poppies in the UK is contracted by Edinburgh-based pharmaceutical company Macfarlan Smith, the UK's only manufacturer of narcotic substances. The company, which took the decision to cultivate the crop in 2001 to maintain a stock of raw material, had previously been entirely dependent upon imports of raw material, which made it vulnerable to market fluctuations and varying harvests. Since then, the amount grown in the UK has increased significantly, from just 21 hectares in 2001 to 774 in 2006.

Opium producer to puff out rivals

TPI Enterprises, a small Tasmania-based biotech company, aims to restore Australia as the world's leading producer of opium-based drugs.

Operation of its opium poppy processing plant at Cressy, near Launceston, was officially launched yesterday by the Tasmanian Primary Industries and Water Minister, David Llewellyn, and the first shipment of an estimated annual production of 60 tonnes of morphine is due to be made before midyear.

TPI's chairman, Ross Dobinson of Melbourne investment group TSL, said the company had developed a safer, more efficient and cheaper extraction process that could deal with the often heavy-handed competition from its larger multinational rivals.


TPI was paying Tasmanian poppy farmers 25% more for their crop than established drug companies such as Johnson & Johnson and Glaxo Wellcome, and would add another 13% to that premium this year.

Mr Ritchie said Australian poppy production, which once accounted for about half the world's legal production, had declined from about 25,000 hectares under cultivation eight years ago to about 8000 hectares last year, the market being taken by growers in Britain, France and Spain.

He said TPI had booked $100 million worth of orders that would allow considerable expansion of poppy production in Tasmania, the only Australian state where the crop is allowed to be grown.

Uganda: Nakivubo Primary School Environment Dangerous

OPIUM and pipe smoking among other cruel activities surrounding Nakivubo Primary School are threatening the lives and academic performance of the pupils, the headteacher has said.

"Though the school is fenced, opium and pipe smoke from the surrounding places directly enters the classrooms when the pupils are studying. Efforts to combat the habit are fruitless," said Kizza Lwanga.

He said the school that was formed in 1954 for Indian pupils now attracts any nationality but the reading environment requires immediate government intervention.

The Story of Opium

In the history of mankind, no forbidden substance has so profoundly affected the fortunes of Asia quite in the way opium has. This 'milk of paradise', has becalmed Roman emperors, accompanied Pharoahs into their tombs, built colonial fortunes and brought a dynasty to its knees. Wars were fought over it, financed by it and ended by its eradication. And over the centuries distinguished writers have consumed opium in copious quantities, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge who wrote Kubla Khan [quoted below] in a dream-like trance while under its influence.

Referred to as 'a drug that had the power of robbing grief and anger of their sting and banishing all painful memories' in Homer's Odyssey, and famously called 'God's own medicine' by Sir William Owsley, opium has been both a medicine and menace to the world for more than 2000 years. Egyptian pharaohs were entombed with opium artefacts by their side and the substance could also readily be bought on the street-markets of Rome during the empire's zenith. Even a 7th Century BC bas-relief from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud in modern day Syria, shows poppy capsules. And in the Ancient Indian medical treatises, The Shodal Gadanigrah and Sharangdhar Samahita, opium is mentioned as a cure for diarrhoea and sexual debility. In fact, it was popularly used for its anaesthetic value well into the nineteenth century and even today is legally cultivated to produce morphine.

Towards the end of the Middle Ages, opium disappeared in Europe for two hundred years during the Holy Inquisition when anything from the East was linked to the devil. However, it began reappearing in medical journals during the Reformation. Then in the sixteenth century opium's use and popularity took a huge leap forward. The pompously named Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim discovered a process he termed 'Laudanum' (literally meaning: something to be praised), which nowadays is known as 'freebasing'. This allowed the opiate to be more efficiently extracted into the substance morphine, which acted more as anaesthetic and pain-killer and less as a hallucinogenic agent. It would also later be used to reduce opium into the far more potent substance heroin, increasing its street value, per weight, ten-fold. With the Age of Exploration in full swing, returning Portuguese sailors popularised its recreational use in Europe.

Opium certainly was the drug of its time, appearing in many famous literary works from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's aforementioned Kubla Khan, to the writings of Thomas de Quincey (Confessions of an English Opium Eater – 1821) and even helped, it is claimed, influence Lewis Carroll into dreaming up Alice Through the Looking Glass. Keats was another who used but never wrote about it. It also corresponded with the arrival in Asia of Dutch, Portuguese and other traders in the 17th century. Until then opium had mainly come overland through the Middle East, but with colonisation the supply increased dramatically. At the time, most of the cultivation took place in Northern India, and it was the Dutch East India Company that first saw the profitability in exporting and trading in opium. The English, who would play the largest role in its geo-political development, did not enter the trade for another century. When they did however, it was to shake Asia to its very core and bring down the largest dynasty the continent had seen since the rise of Ghengis Khan.

It all started with their invasion of Bengal from their enclaves of Calcutta and Bombay. Local barons had a monopoly on opium production and the British wanted to get their hands on it. As the 18th century drew to a close their control was almost complete and opium became fashionable among the royal courts and wealthy households of Europe. This occurred along with another important new Asian commodity that was to become inextricably linked to the rise of opium use – tea. At the time, 240 tons of this fashionable new drink was arriving in England each year and was so important to England's trade that it was symbolically dumped into Boston Harbour by disgusted American colonists in 1773. This lucrative new commodity had, however, created a massive trade debt with the principle production country – China. Opium was already heavily used in China as a recreational drug and in 1799 it was banned by the Imperial Chinese court. But the English, with ambitions in the region, ignored the moral implications and forced the trade. When Qing Emperor Tao Kwang failed in his petition to Queen Victoria, he ordered the confiscation of some 20,000 barrels of opium and detainment of foreign traders. The British reaction was swift and the port-city of Canton promptly attacked. This signaled the beginning of the First Opium war, which ended in 1842 when the Treaty of Nanking required China to cede Hong

Kong to the British. They gained a hugely influential foothold in the South China Sea – and opened five new ports to foreign trade. However, China refused to legalise opium, resulting in a second war which effectively saw the downfall of the Quin Dynasty and demise of China as a wealthy world power for the next 150 years. It also had a significant effect on the population, creating a large number of useless addicts as imports soared to 4,810 tons by 1858. British emissary, Lord Elgin, succeeded in forcing the Chinese to legalise opium imports and although opium now accounted for as much as 15 per cent of the colonial income, the monopoly would soon be broken by American trading clippers. In due course moral attitude shifted and opium trade declined. By this time Britain's own opium imports had risen from a brisk 91 tonnes in 1830 to an astonishing 280 tonnes in 1860.

The British eventually left Hong Kong in 1997, 67 years after China had successfully convinced them to dismantle the India-Opium trade. By then opium was a scourge of the streets where the much more devastating heroin derivative had become a problem worldwide. Heroin originally appeared in 1898 as a substitute remedy for morphine which was first isolated from opium in 1805 by a German pharmacist Wilhelm Sertürner. He named it morphium _ after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams, and it went on to become an important painkiller, still widely used today. Almost a century later the German pharmaceutical company Bayer mixed it with acetic acid to produce diacetylmorphine (with the complex compound structure C17H17NO (C2H3O2)2), which eliminated the side effects of morphine, and they named it heroin. In the 25 years until its banning by the then U.S. Treasury Department's Narcotics Division in 1923, it gained the notorious distinction of being the company's biggest seller ever. It left behind a bunch of addicts that guaranteed an insatiable demand.

With supply channels from India and Afghanistan cut off during World War II, the French began encouraging Hmong hill farmers in Indochina to produce opium for fear of losing their monopoly. At the time a powerful Corsican mafia had succeeded in creating a cartel with immigrants in New York City using Turkish opium, giving rise to the first major international smuggling ring where previously it was openly traded. In fact, many distinguished early Americans grew Papaver somniferum. Thomas Jefferson cultivated opium poppies at his garden in Monticello. As a nice touch, the poppies and seeds were sold at the gift-shop of Thomas Jefferson Centre for Historic Plants right up until 1991, until a drug-bust at the nearby University of Virginia prompted the board of directors to destroy the plants!

Thailand entered the opium trade after the War as production was stepped up by hill tribes – historically skilled at poppy cultivation – in the Golden Triangle area of the country's north. By the time of the Vietnam War the CIA were clandestinely encouraging the trade and even set up a quasi airline, Air America, to ship the opium out and use the proceeds to fund covert operations in Laos. A middle ranking DEA agent at the time dubbed the area 'The Golden Triangle' and the name stuck. Opium was the principal cash crop among the poor ethnic minorities, with poppy cultivation well suited to the hilly landscape and climate. But a concerted eradication effort began in 1969 under the supervision of His Majesty's Royal Project. Sustainable and profitable crop substitution and a push by the military to drive drug barons across the border into Burma gradually killed production. In its place is a world class museum at the Golden Triangle which tells the story of opium, while the majority of opium now comes from Afghanistan. Strictly illegal, highly addictive, grossly destructive yet undeniably seductive, opium and its derivatives continue to burn their way into history.

As to why this is so, we might take insight from Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater when he revealed;

“the opium eater...feels that the diviner part of his nature is paramount; that is, the moral affections are in a state of cloudless serenity; and over all is the great light of majestic intellect...."

... and, on a lighter note...

Prince Harry seconded to opium harvesting duties

Hell-Mandelson Province - (Tory Bora Mess): The Paul-Burrell-spawned tribute act known as Prince Harry has been on opium poppy harvesting duties since the end of December the Ministry of Sitting on the Fence has revealed.

Harry, 23, had demanded a slice of the action in working for a Halliburton regiment in Baghdad as part of his work experience in the Global Piss Process.

He was famously turned down for the posting when a General Belgrano-style two mile exclusion zone was placed around him.

The move followed protests by disgusted bona fide squaddies who said they'd had enough of the fetid Puppet Monarchy charade to add this extra liability to their already stretched resources...