ninme

I still like my saffron idea, but this is even better:

Times Online - Let Afghan poppies bloom, by Rosemary Righter
It is absurd that we spend billions destroying an opium crop that could provide pain relief to millions

Unless we can lay hands on a tool that can cut this Gordian knot — now, not a decade or so from now — Afghanistan could relapse hideously into armed anarchy.

Now consider this. The opium that the world is spending billions to destroy in Afghanistan is the basis of painkilling medicines, such as codeine and morphine, that are in desperately short supply throughout the developing world. Six rich countries consume 80 per cent of the available morphine, and developing countries only 6 per cent; the drug is either beyond their means or not available at all.

To bring supplies of opium-derived painkillers up to adequate levels at affordable prices, the pharmaceutical industry would need an annual 10,000 tonnes of opium produced under licence. Afghanistan illegally produces 4,100 tonnes. If, instead of burning the stuff, the world were to buy it in controlled conditions for medical purposes, millions of Aids and cancer patients who now die in agony could benefit from a drug whose mercies were known in ancient Mesopotamia. Afghan farmers would earn their money legally; tax revenues would improve; drugs warlords would be bypassed and the fall-off in the drugs trade would help to stabilise Central Asia. Afghanistan’s entire crop, at today’s prices, would cost about $650 million a year — less than the world proposes to spend on eradication.

God it’s just brilliant.

The Senlis Council, a French drugs think-tank that will present an extensive feasibility study to a conference in Kabul on September 28, acknowledges the difficulties and says that the long-term aim should be to end Afghan opium production. It describes its proposals for licensed opium as no more than a “transitional” solution complementing rural development, and insists that its strategy would be carefully tested in pilot schemes.

Such caution may be good tactics — not least in winning over the US, whose pharmaceuticals industry could not touch the stuff without Congress’s approval. The fact remains that opium is one of the few “banker” crops in the arid Afghan uplands. If it were possible to divert this dangerous industry into legal channels, the gains would be immense — for Afghans and for the poor who now suffer needless pain. Further ahead, Afghanistan could indeed switch crops: to genetically modified poppies, which, Australian research has discovered, could combat malaria and cancer but would be no use to drug addicts. A losing war could be turned into a winning experiment.

Plus you’d think the farmers would make more money from pharmaceuticals than from a bunch of thugs, so they’d be able to afford all the equipment for the diversifying more quickly. Hmmm. They could plant Crocus sativus.