Pubdate: Tue, 29 Jul 2008
Source: Montreal Gazette (CN QU)
Page: a13
Copyright: 2008 Canwest Publishing Inc.
Contact: http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/letters.html
Website: http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/274
Author: Kevin Dougherty, The Gazette
Cited: Senlis Council http://www.senliscouncil.org/modules/P4M
Referenced: Thomas Schweich's OPED 'Is Afghanistan a Narco-State?' 
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v08/n720/a03.html
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Senlis (Senlis Council)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Afghanistan
Bookmark: http://drugnews.org/topic/poppy (Poppy)

LET POPPIES BE GROWN FOR MEDICINE: EXPERT

Almas Bawar Zakhilwal, an Afghani living in Canada, says the poppy 
eradication program in his country is a failure and stepping it up 
would only fuel the war. Canadian troops are not part of the poppy 
eradication program; it has been contracted out to DynCorp 
International, an American company, which also provides bodyguards 
for Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai.

"Billions have been spent with no success," Zakhilwal said in a 
telephone interview. Zakhilwal is Canadian representative of the 
Senlis Council, a Paris-based organization which advocates licensing 
poppy production to make medical morphine.

Kakhilwal noted that the United States already has a "poppy for 
medicine" program to buy morphine from poppies grown in India and Turkey.

"So why not try it in Afghanistan?" he asked, noting that Liberal 
leader Stephane Dion and the Green Party agree.

But an article in the New York Times Sunday magazine by Thomas 
Schweich, a former senior counter-narcotics official in Afghanistan 
with the U.S. state department, calls for stepping up eradication. In 
Is Afghanistan a Narco-State? Schweich alleges that Karzai has 
blocked the aerial spraying of herbicides to eradicate poppies to 
protect his friends involved in the heroin trade.

Zakhilwal calls Schweich's prescription, allowing the aerial spraying 
of "harmless" herbicides, "totally wrong," noting that the chemicals 
used are not benign and would kill other crops, depriving Afghani 
farmers of their livelihood and making them ripe recruits for the insurgency.

Zakhiliwal said he recently visited his home village in eastern 
Afghanistan, where eradication efforts have worked.

DynCorp now goes into fields and manually destroys the crops. 
Schweich argues aerial spraying would solve the problem.

"Nobody is growing poppies," Zakhiliwal said of his village. "They 
have been arrested several times." Without the poppy crop, he added, 
"people are starving."

According to the United Nations, Afghanistan produces 90 per cent of 
the world's opium, the raw material for heroin.

Zakhiliwal said opium accounts for 60 per cent of Afghanistan's gross 
domestic product and he rejected Schweich's contention that the poppy 
farmers are rich.

In the absence of other economic activity, he said, eradicating poppy 
crops leaves farmers three possibilities: going to Pakistan to seek 
work, joining the uprising or going back to poppy cultivation. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake