James Clayton Welch's Blog, page 3

The Heart of the Golden Crescent: The Poppy Fields of Afghanistan

The lands of Afghanistan have been rife with conflict since the mid-twentieth century all the way to the present. Usually associated with Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban, Afghanistan has another more insidious export that has fueled the United States’ War on Drugs—opium.

An intoxicant that is the main ingredient of heroin, more than ninety percent of the world’s opium is produced in the hills of Afghanistan, smuggled via Iran and Pakistan to the rest of the world, thus forming what is known as the Golden Crescent. The unfortunate consequence of the US occupation post 9/11 was a rise in the production of heroin that heightened the security between these conflict-ridden borders.

Ideal for growing the opium poppy, Afghanistan has traditionally grown crops for local use and was regulated by the Afghan Royal family in the early twentieth century until the last Pashtun dynasty ended in 1978. The following year, after the government began to lose control of the provinces, the Soviets invaded. Opium production expanded at this time as warlords used its sales to generate money to purchase weapons. This was further compounded with the US interventionist foreign policy, and despite presenting an arm’s-length strategy to the world, there have been allegations that American CIA agents were smuggling opium out of Afghanistan to the Soviet Union to weaken it through drug addiction while supporting well-known drug lords.

When the Soviets left in 1989, opium production increased as warring drug lords used the profit to finance their military assistance. Although there is a direct correlation between conflict and opium production, there are some exceptions. The Taliban moved in after the absence of foreign occupation; opium production took a direct hit after their leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, in collaboration with the United Nations, declared poppy growing to be un-Islamic and banned the farming of opium, resulting in one of the world’s most successful drug campaigns.

The victory that eradicated three quarters of the world’s opium was short-lived after the deposition of the Taliban in 2002, following the US occupation in 2001. The Afghan economy collapsed and farmers seeking to create revenue were forced to grow opium for export. In 2004, despite a creation of a new Afghan governments and a new constitution, the two following growing seasons saw record levels of opium production as local government corruption undermined the eradication efforts.

Warlords, controlling the opium trade, flourished despite US presence by providing information on Al-Qaeda and Taliban insurgents. It didn’t help that some drug traffickers were noted government officials, so as the country’s stability was compromised, the drug trade was business as usual.

More profitable that wheat, opium had become the Afghan rural farmer’s source for income. In the years between, there was a stepping up on the eradication programs, but in 2013, in an ironic twist, the UN office on Drugs and Crime suggested that the Taliban had been supporting opium cultivation since 2008 as a source of income for the insurgency.

As the main heroin supplier for Europe in the past ten years, Afghanistan has had forty-thousand foreign troops attempt to manage the security situation, particularly from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). But despite their efforts, there has been a resurgence of opium production and heroin in post-Taliban Afghanistan.

Will there ever be an end to this deadly cycle of war, opium production, and poverty in Afghanistan? For now, it is difficult to ascertain, but until then, we can only watch and wait for what happens next.

Source

Wikipedia. 2016. “Opium Production in Afghanistan.” Last modified November 4. Accessed November 7, 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanistan#Drug_trafficking_and_impact_around_the_world

Wikipedia. 2016. “Golden Crescent.” Last modified August 21. Accessed November 7, 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Crescent

 

 

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Asian Opium Fields: The Origins of the Golden Triangle

The Golden Triangle is the drug center of Southeast Asia, located in the bordering mountains of Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar, and has been a main supplier of opium and heroin for more than two hundred years. Unseated in recent times by the production in Afghanistan and the gaining popularity of yaa baa, an amphetamine-type stimulant, around the ASEAN, the Golden Triangle still thrives despite stringent efforts to suppress production and export. But this is difficult: the mountains are hard to navigate and remain largely unchecked, making for an ideal hotbed of warlords and smugglers.

Merchants from the Afyon province in Turkey, sometime during the thirteenth or fourteenth century, brought opium to India and China, where what was originally known as a medicine soon became a recreational drug for its soothing properties. With the colonizing of India by the British and the arrival of the East India Trading Company in the seventeenth century, opium soon boomed as a commodity, and the profit went to the expansion of the British colonial empire. The only thing the Chinese wanted to trade with the British was silver for their tea. Silver supply dwindled, so Britain directed India to produce opium that soon became the currency for trade, and China’s silver soon went back to India to pay for opium. The prohibition laws in China in the early eighteenth century was largely ignored by the western traders, and when the British refused to sign a bond to stop importing opium to China, the government destroyed twenty thousand chests of opium seized from their warehouses. The British attacked until China surrendered and signed the Treaty of Nanjing, which cost them Hong Kong (only relinquished in 1997), exclusive trade rights, and the opening of opium trade in Chinese ports.

This all changed in the 1860s, when China began to grow massive amounts of opium. Ideal for opium poppy cultivation, the Yunnan area of China bordered British Burma (now independently Myanmar), French Indochina (now the country of Laos and northern Vietnam), and northern Thailand. This area is home to various native hill tribes of both Chinese and Southeast Asian Origin and became a refuge for the refugees fleeing the political instability of China at the start of the twentieth century. Opium then became a highly valuable cash crop for the inhabitants. Thus began an opium monopoly that became what is now known as the Golden Triangle.

Sources

 

Wikipedia. 2016. “Afyonkarahisar.” Last modified October 5. Accessed November 28, 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afyonkarahisar

Asian Pacific Media Services Limited. 2016. “The Golden Triangle Opium Trade: An Overview.” Last modified March 2000. Accessed October 28, 2016. http://www.asiapacificms.com/papers/pdf/gt_opium_trade.pdf

 

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Opium: An Overview and Quick History

A valued ornamental plant, opium is a drug that has helped shape the world as we know it. Wars have been fought, countries have been taken hostage, and lives have been lost all because of this unassuming brown or black powder. Although sometimes sold in a sticky solid, this highly illegal drug can be eaten, drunk, or injected, but most of the time smoked because it enters the brain faster. For pure opium production, the farmers collect sticky brown resin from poppy tears made from scoring a ripening pod to bleed the white milky latex that drips from the side. This is usually sold to a merchant on the black market or refined into a morphine base for easier transport. Pressed into bricks and sundried, this can be smoked as is or processed into other forms like heroin, laudanum, herbal wine, opium syrup, and opium extract.

On the street, it is known as Bog O, dope, hop, midnight oil, and tar. Highly addictive, it can create the feeling of euphoria that can cause lifelong dependence that is difficult to cope with and more difficult to treat. Made from the dried latex from the opium poppy, other drugs such as heroin and morphine can be made from it, thus making it easier to inject via a needle.

An ancient drug, its origins can be traced as far as far as the prehistoric times. Traces of the opium poppy can be found in historical texts from 1500 BC and was mainly for medicinal use. Cultivated in the Middle East, it was traded through Egypt spreading to Greece and Europe, with traces of its use found in Switzerland, Germany, and Spain. It traveled from the Mediterranean through the Silk Road where it reached China, the scene for the Opium Wars in the 1800s. Britain began smuggling opium to China via India using the East India Company to create a high addiction rate among the Chinese to destabilize their government. Such is the effect of this originally innocuous drug.

Despite many restrictions and crack-downs on the illegal trade of this highly lucrative drug, it is still produced in Afghanistan whose mountainous areas connect with Iran and Pakistan and otherwise known as the Golden Crescent. Afghanistan is the main producer of opium and the poppies used in over 90 percent of the world’s heroin. Heavily protected by the Taliban, it is a source of income for the terrorist group with a massive increase in production since the occupation of Afghanistan by the United States between 2002 and 2014.

Opium is listed as a schedule 2 controlled substance (due to its potential for abuse), but it’s regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration because it predates the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act of 1938. Grown legally in parts of Australia, India, and Turkey for medicinal uses, it is used to create morphine and codeine and is used traditionally as a sleeping aid or a pain reliever. Aside from drug manufacturing, the poppy seed which opium comes from is also used as a food source and added in cakes and pastries because of its delicious flavor. So know that when you are biting into your poppy seed bagel, it could come from the same farm that produces opium. Take that thought, put it in your pipe, and smoke it.

 

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Asian Gold: A Quick Look at the Sources of the International Drug Trade

Spanning over forty-eight countries including Russia and Turkey, Asia is notable for its overall large size and population with dense settlements in some areas as well as sparsely populated regions in others. With a total of over 4.4 billion people, it has an ancient history of trade of commerce; thus it comes as no surprise that many of its regions are involved with the international drug trade. And how could it not be when it is the largest continent on the planet with fertile lands and hidden roads that make it easy to evade even the most watchful eye of the most sophisticated satellites?

Such is the case with the current drug trade in Asia. Despite the crackdowns on so many sources, it is still a flourishing business, most notably in two regions known as the Golden Crescent (Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan) and the Golden Triangle (Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand).

Since the ancient times, there has always been the cultivation, use, and trade of psychoactive drugs, but with availability always comes restriction with the first ever written prohibition found in the Islamic Sharia law. Since then, there have been many attempts at drug prohibition, but none as stringent as the resurgent War on Drugs led by the United States in the twentieth century. Many prolegalization activists cite this resurgence as the reason the illegal drug trade still flourishes, following the dictates of the law of supply and demand.

Opium poppy—the plant that produces the white latex liquid that is used to produce opium and opium-based drugs such as heroin, codeine, and morphine—is grown in two major areas in Asia. The Golden Triangle has been the most extensive opium-producing area of the world since the 1950s until the Golden Crescent surpassed its production in the early twenty-first century.

As the second-largest producer of illicit opium, Myanmar has been a significant part of the international drug trade since World War II and is joined by Laos and Thailand as they share a border tripoint. Here, the opium poppy is grown by the tribespeople of the highlands living beyond the poverty line and are exploited by drug warlords and narcotrafficking groups, as well as certain branches of these countries’ governments and international corporations that act as shields for money laundering. The opium is produced then transported via horse and donkey caravans to refineries along the Thailand-Myanmar border and then converted into heroin and other heroin-based products before shipping across the border to various towns in the northern regions of Thailand and then to Bangkok before further distribution to international markets.

However, the Golden Triangle is not as productive as its Central Asian counterpart—the Golden Crescent. As heroin production in Southeast Asia declined, the production of opium in Afghanistan increased in 1991, making it the world’s primary producer of opium and hashish. With an older history than the Golden Triangle, it has been producing opium since the 1950s with only a momentary interruption with the invasion of Afghanistan by the United States in 2001 after 9-11. Back in the trade after a short hiatus, the Golden Crescent hit its peak production in 2007 with more than eight thousand of the world’s nine thousand total tons of opium. Almost a monopoly, the product is distributed to Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Central Asia and supplies opiates to over nine million users worldwide.

Traffickers take the opium through the mountainous borders to Iran to further distribute the product to Europe and Africa where there is a high demand for opiates. More than one million people are involved in this illicit trade, and like the poor poverty-stricken opium growers in the highlands of Southeast Asia, many of those involved have no choice since this is the only way they can earn a living in the harsh and unforgiving environments of their war-ridden lands.

An endless cycle of exploitation, the drug trade and the hard-to-pin-down concept of the War on Drugs is a terrible phenomenon brought about by the greed and corruption of a few who put importance on profit over people. This negative phenomenon will cost more lives and create endless suffering until a more viable and humanitarian approach is discovered. But for now, all we can do is watch as these events unfold and wait with bated breath for the eventual outcome, whatever that may be.

 

 

Sources

Wikipedia. 2016. “Opium Production in Afghanistan.” Last modified October 6. Accessed October 24, 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanistan#Drug_trafficking_and_impact_around_the_world

Wikipedia. 2016. “Golden Crescent.” Last modified August 21. Accessed October 24, 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Crescent

Wikipedia. 2016. “Golden Triangle (Southeast Asia).” Last modified September 30. Accessed October 24, 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Triangle_(Southeast_Asia)

 

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