Afghanistan's puppet government has refused US offers and demand for poppy eradication. Arguments regarding sole viable product, increased resistance from starving farmers, ruined farmland (they don't want another Columbia?) are excellent points.

Total agreement. Legalize all drugs, dismantle horribly expensive and intrusive LE/military enforcement and derive tax revenue for addiction treatment from legitimate sales ala alcohol and nicotine.

The barrier being Christians who consider individual liberty a sin as described by their dogma based on fairy tales and politicians who use war on drugs spending as a power base.

The US Government is the biggest drug dealer in the world and it will do everything to prortect its rights in this business. The money is necessary for CIA in cover-up and false-flag operations. CIA with its secret armies (like Al Qaeda) has completed a big number of assassinations, coups and wars with this money without needing permission from US Congress and people.


Quote:
The Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world's top heroin producer, supplying 60 per cent of U.S. demand. CIA assets again controlled this heroin trade. As the Mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan Intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories.

The revenues generated from the CIA sponsored Afghan drug trade are sizeable. The Afghan trade in opiates constitutes a large share of the worldwide annual turnover of narcotics, which was estimated by the United Nations to be of the order of $400-500 billion (1998).
At the time these UN figures were first brought out (1994), the (estimated) global trade in drugs was of the same order of magnitude as the global trade in oil.
The IMF estimated global money laundering to be between 590 billion and 1.5 trillion dollars a year, representing 2-5 percent of global GDP. (Asian Banker, 15 August 2003). A large share of global money laundering as estimated by the IMF is linked to the trade in narcotics.
The revenues associated with the global trade in narcotics are not appropriated by terrorist groups and warlords, as suggested by the UNODC report. In turn, the CIA, which protects the drug trade, has developed complex business and undercover links to major criminal syndicates involved in the drug trade. In other words, intelligence agencies and powerful business syndicates allied with organized crime, are competing for the strategic control over the heroin routes.
US foreign policy supports the workings of a thriving criminal economy in which the demarcation between organized capital and organized crime has become increasingly blurred.

The CIA: America's Premier International Terrorist Organization
Prohibition: The So-Called War on Drugs, Page One
SIGHTINGS 50 Years Of CIA Drug Dealing