poppy don't go

'From 1997 to 2000 and again in 2002, the world's largest producer of opuim was Afghanistan, responsible for about 70% of the world's supply. So what happened in 2001? The Taliban banned opium poruction in the late summer of 2000 and destroyed almost all the opium that still remained planted; this was completed and confirmed in January of 2001. According to the Independent, "The area of land given over to growing opium poppies in 2001 fell by 91% compared with the year before, according to the UN Drug Control Programmes' annual survey of Afghanistan. Production of fresh opium, the raw material for heroin, went down by an unprecedented 94%, from 3, 276 tonnes to 185 tonnes."

The planting season for opuim in that region is November, and the harvest is in the spring.

It is not suprising that the US completed its invasion of Afghanistan in November 2001 in the middle of the opuim planting season. Among the first things the US forces and CIA did was to liberate a number of known opium warlords who, they said, would assist US forces. Opium farmers rejoiced and, amidst reports that they were being encouraged to do so, began planting massive opium crops. When the harvest of June 2002 came, Afghanistan had again become the world's largest producer of the opium poppy and the world's largest heroin supplier. From a paltry 180 tons under the Taliban in 2001, according to the UN, the estimated 2002 harvest, under CIA protection, was close to 3, 700 tons. By March of 2003 World Bank President James Wolfensohn was erporting record levels of opium production and that drugs were a bigger earner for Afghanistan than foreign aid.

The 2003 crop set new records, coming in at almost 4, 000 tons.

When I learned in early 2001 that the Taliban had destroyed Afghanistan's opium crop, I wrote that it was a form of economic warfare that might take a whole lot of money out of the world's banking system and its cooked books. There is always a lag between planting, harvesting, and the cash flows that show up as the heroin moves from farm, to laboratory, through several layers of wholesaling to the streets. The positive cash flow generated by Afghanistan's first post-Taliban harvest would not have started to hit the banking system for maybe 6 to 8 months after June of 2002. In the late summer and fall of 2002 the Dow Jones had sunk to nearly 7.200.'


-Taken from "Crossing the Rubicon - The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. by Michael C Ruppert