America’s “war on drugs,” launched by President Richard Nixon in 1971, raged for more than half a century but hardly put a dent in the Afghan opium trade.
The country’s farms account for more than 80 per cent of the world’s opium production but even the American invasion in 2001 did little to disrupt the flow of drugs out of the nation.
But now, where the world’s drug enforcement community has failed, the Taliban themselves are succeeding.
In April last year, the group’s religious leaders issued an edict prohibiting poppy farming across Afghanistan. More than 12 months on, the ban is being described by experts as “the most successful counter-narcotics effort in human history”.
The impact on the ground has been dramatic. Afghan poppy production has plummeted by an estimated 80 per cent in the last year as Taliban enforcers move from farm to farm destroying crops and punishing offenders.
Cultivation in Helmand province, which once produced around four-fifths of Afghanistan’s poppies and was the centre of British operations in the country from 2001 to 2015, fell to around 2,500 acres this year, down from 320,000 the year before, according to estimates based on satellite imagery.
Now, experts are warning of profound and unpredictable consequences if the ban on poppy production holds – consequences that will reach far beyond Afghanistan’s borders.
Opiate production in countries like Myanmar and Mexico could boom to fill the void created by Taliban, with all sorts of attendant impacts on trafficking routes, gangs and supply chains.
Meanwhile, Afghan farmers and others who rely on the poppy trade could be driven to leave the country, further undermining the domestic economy and exacerbating irregular migration pressures on large parts of Europe, Asia and America.
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 that, through overdose, are killing more young and middle-aged Americans (18-45) than cancer, heart disease or guns.
“I think the concern would be that if heroin supplies diminish significantly – and we won’t get a flavour of that until next year – a lot of fentanyl will come into the system,” said Harry Shapiro, a UK-based expert with 45 years of experience in the narcotics field and director of DrugsWise.
“And if there was a lot of fentanyl, or similar, in the system, then the likely outcome of that is more deaths, rather than a longer cycle of addiction. People don’t get addicted to heroin after a few days, but your first hit of fentanyl could be your last.”
It is not the first time that the Taliban attempted to clamp down on poppy production in Afghanistan, which itself has long struggled with heroin addiction. A similar ban was imposed in 2000, the last time the group was in power, but it was effectively ended by the US-led invasion the following year.
That experience showed an interruption in supply can take some time 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 trafficking route out of Afghanistan to be exhausted, experts say.
Following the last ban on production, international opium prices surged and, in the UK, the purity of heroin sold on the streets fell from 55 to 34 per cent.
“Back then the ban was fairly short-lived,” said Mr Shapiro. “But the poppy trail is so long from Afghanistan to the UK, that you never know how much heroin is in transit at any one time. The actual ban didn’t really impact supply.”
This time around, experts are waiting to see if the Taliban’s edict will last beyond one season, which starts each November with the planting of poppy seeds.
In religious terms at least, the ban certainly sounds like it may be permanent.
“All Afghans are informed that from now on cultivation of poppy has been strictly prohibited across the…
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