Afghanistan: Opium supply drops 95% after Taliban drug ban – DW – 11/05/2023
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Afghanistan's Taliban rulers pledged to wipe out the country's drug industry, banning poppy cultivation in April 2022. Afghanistan was the world's biggest opium producer and a major source for heroin in Europe and Asia.

Opium production in Afghanistan has plummeted since the Taliban banned cultivation of the poppy plant, according to a UN report published on Sunday.

Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers pledged to wipe out the country’s drug industry, banning poppy cultivation in April 2022.

Poppy plants are the source of opium and heroin. Afghanistan was the world’s biggest opium producer and a major source for heroin in Europe and Asia before the Taliban takeover.

  • archomrade [he/him]English
    2·
    1 year ago

    There’s a lot of unfounded speculation that the US was installing their own poppy operations in place of the Taliban run ones, both to take the revenue and to control the supply for state subversion abroad.

    I can’t speak to that, but during the US occupation poppy exports actually accelerated, not declined, even while the US was allegedly conducting a bombing expedition against Taliban heroin production (operation Iron Tempest).

    Economic incentives aside, global heroin distribution is incredibly devastating to communities worldwide, and we should absolutely be aiming to replace that income with another. That the US was comfortable letting it continue and even accelerate (given their active domestic campaign against the drug in 2017) does suggest something rather unseemly was happening with their active involvement.