Poppies Escape Marjah Offensive

March 14, 2010 Afghanistan produces about 90 percent of the world's supply of opium poppies, the plant used to make heroin. About half of that supply comes from the
Helmand province. Earlier efforts by NATO forces to destroy the poppy
crops were unsuccessful; when the Taliban came back, so did the farmer's
poppies. In the most recent offensive, NATO took a mostly hands-off
approach, leaving the farmers and their crops alone. Guest host Audie
Cornish speaks with author and journalist Gretchen Peters about the
effects of the NATO offensive around Marjah on the poppy trade in
Afghanistan

More ...
Opium
History
Opium Images
Opium Timeline
Opioid Receptors
Taliban Drug-Warriors
Heroin after the Taliban
Is the opium trade halal in Islam?
Opium cultivation and the warlords
Afghanistan, Opium and the Taliban
Afghan opium crop: a bumper harvest
Afghan farmers prepare fields for poppies
Should opium poppy production be legalised?
The Heroin Trail: Britain, USA and Afghanistan
"Taliban prepare to unleash their deadliest weapon"
Osama bin Laden: "heroin dealer" and "narco-terrorist"
Opium and the new Afghanistan: a drug smuggler's paradise

Comment

Comment by fireguy on March 15, 2010 at 4:00pm: Natural medicines are always better. I am sure the scientists out there could do a lot of good research on plant based medicines if funding was made available like it is for synthetic oil based "medicines".

Comment by Anti Oligarch on March 15, 2010 at 2:52pm: "God's Own Medicine"

Sir William Osler

Opium is an extract of the exudate derived from seedpods of the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum. The poppy plant was cultivated in the ancient civilisations of Persia, Egypt and Mesopotamia. Archaeological evidence and fossilised poppy seeds suggest that Neanderthal man may have used the opium poppy over thirty thousand years ago. Less controversially, the first known written reference to the poppy appears in a Sumerian text dated around 4,000 BC. The flower was known as hul gil, plant of joy. Papaver somniferum is the only species of Papaver used to produce opium. It is believed to have evolved through centuries of breeding and cultivation from a Mediterranean-growing wild strain, Papaver setigerum.

Homer conveys its effects in The Odyssey. In one episode, Telemachus is depressed after failing to find his father Odysseus. But then Helen...

Comment by fireguy on March 15, 2010 at 10:51am: AO, I think you are right about that. All wars are ecomomic. Is not the president of Afghanistans brother the biggest opium dealer? Have not heard about him for awhile.

Comment by TheLasersShadow on March 15, 2010 at 8:59am: Before the US first invaded the Taliban had the opium issue under strict control just go look it up. Today with the CIA puppet Gov the opium production is through the roof. The Taliban isn't the issue the CIA is.

Comment by Anti Oligarch on March 15, 2010 at 1:48am: I can speculate that the Opium Wars never ended it was simply economic for a while but always been going on behind our backs.

Comment by fireguy on March 14, 2010 at 7:23pm: The Outbreak of the First Opium War

http://www.victorianweb.org/history/empire/opiumwars/opiumwars1.html

"This war with China . . . really seems to me so wicked as to be a national sin of the greatest possible magnitude, and it distresses me very deeply. Cannot any thing be done by petition or otherwise to awaken men's minds to the dreadful guilt we are incurring? I really do not remember, in any history, of a war undertaken with such combined injustice and baseness. Ordinary wars of conquest are to me far less wicked, than to go to war in order to maintain smuggling, and that smuggling consisting in the introduction of a demoralizing drug, which the government of China wishes to keep out, and which we, for the lucre of gain, want to introduce by force; and in this quarrel are going to burn and slay in the pride of our supposed superiority." — Thomas Arnold to W. W. Hull, March 18, 1840