NATO's Opium 2

 

The chart is world opium production from 1998 through 2011. ( If it is a bit small, click on it or go to "View" on your browser and "Zoom" in.) It shows the opium production of three countries: Afghanistan, Myanmar (Burma), and the Lao PDR. One can trace the evolution of Afghanistan to its present predominance in the opium industry under NATO control. From second-place in production under the Taliban, it has surged under our program of winning "hearts and minds", which cannot be thought to be successful if there is no cash crop for farmers to grow.

I think in the past that I - and probably others - had said that NATO could buy the poppies outright and pay the farmers directly. The amount of money spent would probably be far less than the total social cost of the drug problems in the world's societies. It probably would be less than the total cost to society in just the NATO countries.

If instead we paid the Afghan warlords for the poppies, the cost would probably sky rocket, but again it might still be considerably less than the social cost.

We could probably have paid the farmers twice what they usually received for their crops, and destroyed all the poppies, and everyone would have been physically and psychologically ahead, and would have saved trillions of dollars.

Why this was not done is a matter for conjecture.

I conjecture that NATO is funneling a good portion of the profits to Government and Business elite groups throughout the world. Some of the money is probably being laundered to help offset some of the myriad financial problems the USA and Europe have faced and are facing.

If you do not believe so, fine. Just explain to me how we can send robot drones to kill a guy leaving a coffee house in Yemen and getting into his Mercedes, while NATO has total control of the skies in Afghanistan, the spy satellites are all working, and there are probably plenty of drones available to take out drug lords... if we wished to.

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