Global Courant
America’s “war on drugs,” launched by President Richard Nixon in 1971, raged for more than half a century but barely made a dent in the Afghan opium trade.
The country’s farms account for more than 80 percent of the world’s opium production, but even the 2001 US invasion failed to disrupt the flow of drugs from the country.
But now, where the global drug enforcement community has failed, the Taliban themselves are succeeding.
In April last year, the group’s religious leaders issued an edict banning poppy cultivation throughout Afghanistan. More than 12 months later, the ban has been described by experts as “the most successful counter-narcotics effort in human history”.
The impact on the ground was dramatic. Afghanistan’s poppy production has plummeted by an estimated 80 percent over the past year as Taliban enforcers go from farm to farm destroying crops and punishing offenders.
Cultivation in Helmand province, which once produced about four-fifths of Afghanistan’s poppies and was the center of Britain’s operations in the country from 2001 to 2015, has fallen to about 2,500 hectares this year, down from 320,000 the year before, according to estimates on based on satellite images.
Experts are now warning of far-reaching and unpredictable consequences if the ban on poppy production remains in place – consequences that will extend far beyond Afghanistan’s borders.
Opiate production in countries like Myanmar and Mexico could boom to fill the void created by the Taliban, impacting smuggling routes, gangs and supply chains.
Meanwhile, Afghan farmers and others dependent on the poppy trade could be pushed to leave the country, further undermining the domestic economy and exacerbating irregular migratory pressures across much of Europe, Asia and the Americas.
It’s also possible that the gap left by the collapse of the world’s largest opium market could be filled by fentanyl and other synthetic opioids — substances whose overdoses kill more young and middle-aged Americans (18-45) than cancer, heart and vascular disease. disease or weapons.
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“I think the concern would be that if heroin stocks were to drop significantly – and we won’t get an idea of that until next year – there will be a lot of fentanyl coming into the system,” said Harry Shapiro, a UK-based expert with 45 years of experience. experience in the narcotics field and director of DrugsWise.
“And if there was a lot of fentanyl or something like that in the system, then the likely outcome of that is more deaths than a longer addiction cycle. People don’t get addicted to heroin after a few days, but your first dose of fentanyl could be your last.”
It is not the first time the Taliban have attempted to suppress poppy production in Afghanistan, which itself has long struggled with heroin addiction. A similar ban was imposed in 2000, the group’s last time in power, but was effectively ended the following year by the US-led invasion.
Experience shows that it can take a while for a supply interruption to make itself felt internationally. Opium is relatively easy to store and it will take another year to 18 months for hoarded supplies along the smuggling route from Afghanistan to be exhausted, experts say.
After the latest production ban, international opium prices rose and in the UK the purity of heroin sold on the street dropped from 55 to 34 percent.
“At the time, the ban was quite short-lived,” Mr Shapiro said. “But the poppy path is so long from Afghanistan to the UK, you never know how much heroin is on the way. The actual ban did not really affect the supply.”
This time, experts are waiting to see if the Taliban’s edict will last longer than one season, which begins with the planting of poppy seeds every November.
In religious terms, the ban certainly sounds like it could be permanent.
“All Afghans have been informed that from now on the cultivation of poppy is strictly prohibited throughout the country,” said the edict issued in April 2022 by Taliban Supreme Leader Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada.
“They will not plant poppy on their land. If someone plants poppy on his land, the poppy will be destroyed and he will take legal action.”
But the economics of prohibition make no sense.
In a recent briefing to the UK Parliament, Dr David Mansfield, author of “A State Built on Sand: How opium undermined Afghanistan”, estimated that the ban has wiped out the equivalent of 450,000 full-time agricultural jobs – a major blow to an economy still reeling from drought, conflict and cuts in development programs.
On its own, Afghanistan’s opiate economy, including domestic consumption and exports, accounted for between 9 and 14 percent of the country’s GDP in 2021.
A senior analyst from the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crimes, who recently traveled to Afghanistan and asked not to be named for fear of jeopardizing his contacts in the country, said the picture on the ground is “quite complicated”.
“We need to analyze and properly evaluate the idea of the Taliban enforcing the edict uniformly,” the analyst said. “We have to be a bit skeptical. Because of the complex political economy, they cannot upset local communities.”
The analyst suggested the ban was enforced to gain Western diplomatic recognition, a view shared by local Afghans. “The Taliban ban on poppies is not a Sharia decision, but rather a political interaction with the international community,” said a tribal leader from Nad-e Ali district in Helmand, who declined to be named in case of reprisals.
Others, however, are convinced that the ban is absolute for now. Graeme Smith, an Afghanistan expert with Crisis Group, said the crackdown so far “has been the most successful counter-narcotics effort in human history, by the amount of drugs withdrawn from the market”.
Mohammadullah, a farmer in Nawazd district, said: “The Taliban are definitely implementing the decisions of their leaders. They’ve been watching the land of all the people who planted even a little opium. They destroyed their fields and imprisoned some farmers.”
Deprived of their income, men like Mohammadullah can leave Afghanistan in search of new opportunities. According to Dr Mansfield, there have already been reports of “emergency sales” among farmers who have no poppy stocks to fall back on.
“So they sell the family gold, the wife’s dowry and sell some land,” he told MPs earlier this month. “There is also emigration…one of the viable strategies to cope, if there is no poppy for an extended period of time, will be to leave the country.”
For now it is too early to say how the global market will react to the ban, but there are early indications of what could happen next.
Myanmar’s instability has led to an explosion in poppy cultivation, with the junta and many of its opponents’ militias tacitly supporting growers because it is an important source of income and alternative options are limited.
In 2022, the first full growing season since the junta took power, the amount of land used to grow opium poppies rose 33 percent to 40,100 hectares, while production nearly doubled to 795 tons, according to a UN report released in January. published.
Tom Kean, a Myanmar expert with Crisis Group, said the opium boom in Myanmar was not caused by the drought in Afghanistan, but could eventually be fueled by it.
“The question of whether Myanmar will become the largest producer in the world goes back a long way,” said Kean. “But if the ban is as strict as it was in 2000/01, then it could happen.”
More generally, the long-term imposition of the ban would likely increase opium prices, especially as international supplies become depleted, incentivizing new entrants to enter the market.
In an analysis published this month, the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, a UK-based charity, said opium production could increase in several countries and regions with the right climate, including India, Turkey and Central Asia.
However, it said the sheer volume of new or diverted production needed to replace Afghan opium, establish labs to convert it into heroin and increase the capacity of smuggling routes from other areas, not from one to another day would happen.
“When stocks dry up, adjustments will come in the market,” said Martin Jelsma, Program Director for Drugs and Democracy at the Transnational Institute, a Netherlands-based think tank. “But it would probably take a few more years for smuggling routes to recover.”
Perhaps the most worrying prospect is a sudden increase in the availability of synthetic opioids if the Taliban’s ban eventually leads to a shortage of heroin.
In a 2022 report, the UN said the crackdown “could lead to … (the) substitution of heroin or opium with other substances at the user level, some of which may be even more harmful than heroin or opium (such as fentanyl and its analogues) .).”
Fentanyl, which can be easily manufactured in makeshift labs and is 50 times more potent than heroin, would be an attractive alternative for organized crime groups: a kilogram of the drug could be smuggled onto the market much more easily than 50 kilograms of heroin. the same yield.
At the same time, the market’s need for heroin is declining, says Paul Griffiths, scientific director of the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction, adding that the addiction wave of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s is largely over.
Against this backdrop, the Taliban’s ban may completely push criminal groups away from the drug and encourage them to establish new illicit markets instead.
The experience of the 2001 “heroin drought” — and the response of the European market, which receives 95 percent of its opium from Afghanistan — somewhat illustrates what could happen, Griffiths says.
Then there were “profound changes in the opioid-using market that persisted over time, especially in the Baltic states,” he said. In countries such as Estonia, fentanyl replaced heroin as the drug of choice for opioid addicts. This remains the case to this day.
“We know from previous experience that this disruption can change the balance in the drug market and once new products become established they can persist over time,” added Mr Griffiths. “So it’s certainly a potential threat that synthetic opioids are taking off.”
Western Europe’s superior health systems and harm reduction services should protect the region from the sudden availability of fentanyl, but this may not be the case in the east of the continent, where such infrastructure “does not exist,” Jelsma said.
“There is a greater risk for the old countries of the Soviet Union,” he added.
But like many other experts, Mr. Jelsma agrees that it is impossible to say with any certainty what will happen in the next two years. But if the Taliban’s ban holds, he said there could be serious consequences “for which we must be prepared”.
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