Farming illegality

I’ve just been watching an SBS program about Afghanistan. A region that has been fought over for centuries and that has developed a very effective and reasonably profitable (in that it keeps the farmers’ families alive) agricultural product for their land and locality.

The trouble is that Afghanistan is a bit like the old land of Palestine, a crossroads, giving access to markets and ports, yet defended, always defended, by peoples of a fiercely independent and warrior culture. It is a matter of history that the last fifty years have been less than kind to this area of our Earths’ surface.

But what puzzles me is, the majority of the farmers in the program would love not to grow the poppies that produce opium because they know what the end result is. But this crop brings sufficient income to keep their families alive in an area that has little or nothing in the way of other crops or industries that would afford the same level of sufficiency. The trouble is that the product created from the hard labour of the Afghan farmers, and others in similar situations, does not really profit them. It pays the farmers enough to keep them going, like the majority of farmers anywhere in the world. The ones who benefit are the ones who sell the end product to people who are desperate to feel good.

For years we have been fighting “The War Against Drugs”, which if one evaluates it by the standards of traditional “wars”, is well and truly lost in spite of all the rhetoric from various authorities. So if these two factors are considered as being mutually dependant in some way, why is it so difficult to admit that the “war on drugs ” is lost because it is being waged as something preventable - so the farmers of Afghanistan are asked to not plant their only really profitable crop with not much apparent encouragement or support to plant anything else that would grow in such impoverished soils or be as profitable for them as the opium poppy crop.

Meanwhile more young people try opium derivatives as well as other chemical cocktails, doing poorly understood long term damage to themselves and costing heartache, tragedy and pain to their families and loved ones, not to mention the financial cost to the wider society. The only people who profit are those who most people would call “organized crime”.

First really apparent in the 1920s in the USA in response to the prohibition of alcohol, these “organizations” have been with us ever since. The ending of prohibition merely encouraged them to look for other products to sell into new markets. In a warped sort of way, these people have also been examples of “the American way” in the footsteps of McDonalds, Coca-Cola and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Perhaps if the use of currently illegal drugs was not so widely seen as something being banned because the people banning all these wonderful chemicals just don't know how to have fun, and better information on all the effects (good and bad) were made available while at the same time the government finds some way of taxing the trade in the same way it taxes the liquor and tobacco industries now (which cost our communities far more than the currently illegal drugs do), then perhaps there would be sufficient funds to be shared with the Afghani and other poor farmers in the same situation, so that they can find less troublesome crops to sow?