Pubdate: Sun, 05 Nov 2006 Source: Chronicle Herald (CN NS) Copyright: 2006 The Halifax Herald Limited Contact: http://thechronicleherald.ca/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/180 Author: Douglas Bland Note: Douglas Bland is a professor and chair of the defence management studies program at the School of Policy Studies, Queen's University at Kingston, Ont. AFGHANISTAN DRUG PROBLEM NOT THAT EASY TO SOLVE Simple policy analysis leads, of course, to simple solutions that very rarely succeed. Scott Taylor - in between making gratuitous remarks about Canadian military officers - offers to the public just such a simplistic suggestion for redressing the poppy/narcotics problem in Afghanistan (Oct. 30 column). He recommends that "we" should buy the poppy harvest directly from the farmers, thereby eliminating the drug trade, cutting the warlords out of the market and lessening their influence, and enriching the farmers. Everybody wins. Unfortunately, the problem is more complex, and Mr. Taylor's "solution" would likely cause more problems and violence in the country and elsewhere. The flaw in his "free enterprise"solution and in the "eradication" solution now in place is that both are based on the erroneous notion that we are dealing with a supply problem - the production of opium made available to a market. In fact, we are dealing with a demand problem. It is the demand for illegal drugs in North America, Europe, Russia and Asia that stimulates the cultivation and production of drugs in Columbia, Africa, Afghanistan and, indeed, in marijuana grow-ops in Canada. Basic economic theory and reality suggest that were we to enter the drug market, we would stimulate a bidding war with other buyers - the warlords - and encourage more farmers to enter the business because the demand and price would increase. We would also increase the violence in the area as buyers in an already unregulated marketplace attacked each other and the farmers as they tried to control prices and market share - see Chicago, circa 1920. Our buyers would be the first on the hit list. Arguably, the conflict would spread to other growing areas outside Afghanistan, some of which are legitimate, as Mr. Taylor's so-called free enterprise system began to distort the market worldwide. And what would Mr. Taylor do with the drugs he bought, inflating prices and booming production? To throw the drugs on the legal medicine-opiate market, for instance, would drive the price for legal growers through the floor, or would Mr. Taylor provide support payments for them too? Which farmers would be allowed into the new system - only those now in operation? Why not everyone who wants in, as required by "free enterprise" concepts? Removing illegal drugs from the illegal, drug-user marketplace would create a medical and police emergency across the world as the availability of drugs fell and the price rose. Or should we simply buy the drugs at market prices and then distribute them freely about our streets? And why would the warlords disappear from the market when prices go up? Rather, the incentive to get into the business would surely increase. Mr. Taylor explains, simplistically, that "poppy pickers are the highest paid agricultural workers of central Asia" because, in his opinion, the job is difficult and critical. But this is, of course, a second order explanation. These workers are highly paid and their bosses make lots of money because the demand for their product is high and the source is controlled by illegal and violent means. Substituting another buyer would not change the poppy pickers' situation, but it might make them richer. Canadians and international policy makers ought to beware of crude, ill-informed suggestions, especially when they are made in part to attack unfairly people who are trying to deal with a serious, complex problem. Moreover, policy suggestions that are based on faulty notions, in this case confusing a demand problem for a supply problem, may only exacerbate the difficulties we and the Afghans face. Eradication strategies, free-enterprise strategies, and crop-exchange policies will not on their own eliminate the Afghan illicit drug market unless they are combined with strategies to eliminate the demand for drugs from outside the country. As "Plan Colombia" illustrates, the prospects for combining supply and demand policies successfully are not good. Finally, Canada did not deploy the Canadian Forces to Afghanistan to solve the country's drug problem, although redressing it may be part of the Afghan national development strategy. Using this non-mission, therefore, as a whipping-boy to attack the integrity of Canadian officers and soldiers and officials is as dishonest as Mr. Taylor's analysis is simplistic and unhelpful. - --- MAP posted-by: Derek