Opium Production

Afghan President Hamid Karzai is attempting to appease his Western backers by eradicating the country's opium crop, but violence is flaring as a result.

Britain's Conservative Party has joined the call to license Afghan opium. The move comes just days after the British Medical Association called for it to be converted into diamorphine (heroin) for use by the National Health Service.

While the US using tried-and-failed eradication schemes on the Afghan opium trade, others including the UN and World Bank are calling for smarter alternative development. Others are going even further.

As 2006 comes to a close, we look back at the year's biggest drug reform defeats, disappointments, and downers.

With Afghan opium production going through the roof, US drug czar John Walters announced Saturday that the Afghan government would begin using herbicides to eradicate the poppy crop. But the Afghan government hasn't officially agreed yet.

A new report from the World Bank and UN is just the latest to warn of the difficulties facing drug warriors in Afghanistan. The report is comprehensive, exacting, and grim.

The military junta in Myanmar has been crowing about how it's cooperating in the fight against opium production, but a report from the Shan States suggests the military is turning a blind eye to production and trading by allied ethnic militias.

Despite press reports to the contrary, a think tank advocating licensing of Afghanistan's opium crop for the licit medical market has not been banned from the country, the group says.

Professor Barnett Rubin gives the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a tutorial on the economic and political consequences of prohibition when it comes to Afghan opium.

A proposal to turn Afghanistan's burgeoning opium crop into morphine for the legal medicinal market is gaining more support.