Discussion for article #222261
Legalize, if you wan to kill yourself with it go ahead
Link below is to a highly informative 2013 UN survey of Afghan Opium production, however, I’m curious just exactly how the drug travels from Afghanistan to the average American High School with such deadly ease?
Here is an interesting computation.
Total opium crop 5,500,000 kg.
Price paid to the farmer per kg in 2013: $143
Total gross income to Afghan farmers from growing opium:
$790 million.
Total spent by the U.S. attempting to eradicate opium: $7.5 billion (with no success).
How about just buying the entire Afghan opium crop (or paying them the same to not grow anything at all) and call it “economic aid” to Afghanistan?
(see http://www.unodc.org/documents/crop-monitoring/Afghanistan/Afghan_report_Summary_Findings_2013.pdf)
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Naw, we couldn’t do that, unless all these farmers would incorporate so we could call it corporate welfare.
Elsewhere in the article, it said the gross was $3B. Not sure whose figures are correct, but you’re exactly right. It’s idiotic to run around Afghanistan blowing at least twice as much money and alienating and impoverishing the farmers instead of buying the crop and turning it into medicine.