Pubdate: Thu, 20 Sep 2007 Source: Georgia Straight, The (CN BC) Copyright: 2007 The Georgia Straight Contact: http://www.straight.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1084 Author: Travis Lupick Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin) OPIUM FOR MEDS, NOT DRUGS Edward McCormick was meeting with an associate in Kandahar when a suicide bomber blew himself up just blocks away. The explosion was deafening and sent a strong wave of heat over the surrounding area. As the crowded Afghan street was engulfed in panic, McCormick said his initial reaction was not fear but grief. "I was not concerned and wasn't thinking about myself," he told the Georgia Straight . "It was a feeling of sadness and emptiness at that sudden loss of life." McCormick once worked as a paramedic in Vancouver. He now spends much of his time abroad as the Afghanistan country director for the Senlis Council, a Canada-based think tank that focuses on drug policy. McCormick's brush with terrorism came in the summer of 2007. "We had suicide bombings there every day, and sometimes more than one," he said. "It's a very violent, sudden loss of life. It's truly sickening." According to an August 2007 United Nations report, opium cultivation for heroin is funding the insurgency in Afghanistan and has "soared to frightening record levels" this year. The report stated that the total opium harvest for Afghanistan has grown by a third since 2006 and that overall cultivation levels are at an all-time high for the second year in a row. A poppy-for-medicine program would pay village collectives for morphine tablets made from cultivated opium poppies, McCormick explained. The Afghan government would license villages, where factories could then be built to produce morphine of an international pharmaceutical grade. "Eighty-two percent of the world's countries who can't afford morphine could start to buy it," he added. The U.S. State Department's recently revised "Counternarcotics Strategy for Afghanistan" characterized the legal purchase of Afghan opium crops as an "impossibility". It argued that a buyout strategy would encourage more Afghans to grow opium poppies while failing to provide the infrastructure required to manufacture and distribute legal opium products. Michael Byers, academic director for UBC's Liu Institute for Global Issues, argued that the first challenge a poppy-for-medicine program would encounter would be the "hard-line eradication approach" favoured by the U.S., which focuses on crop eradication. "The current U.S. government would be very opposed to any NATO country participating in what would essentially be the legalized production of poppies in Afghanistan," Byers told the Straight . Alex Morrison, president for the Canadian Institute for Strategic Studies, questioned the feasibility of a poppy-for-medicine program. He argued that security would be the biggest challenge for those who chose to sever ties with Afghan's warlords. "Do you know what is going to happen to the farmer the next day?" he asked. "The farmer is going to be dead, because the warlords will not accept being frozen out." In Morrison's opinion, security would have to come before any incentive for farmers to leave the drug trade. "It's not as easy as poppies for medicine," he said. "As long as you've got the organized-crime syndicates or loose organizations of warlords controlling the drug trade, it's not going to get any better." McCormick was confident that the political will could be mustered and the security challenges could be met. "There is another planting season going to happen in October," he said. "It is an ideal time to send an important, very clear message to the people of Afghanistan: that the international community is here to help." - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake