The United Nations drug control office estimates that the Afghan opium harvest will yield up to 3,000 tons of opium this spring. That's what UN spokeswoman Antonella Deledda told a press conference in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, the Frontier Post (Pakistan) reported Monday. While well below the record Afghan crop of 1999, when the yield hit 4,600 tons, the huge harvest is a remarkable reversal from last year. In 2001, the Taliban effectively banned opium growing and the estimated yield plummeted to 300 tons, most of it from areas controlled by the Northern Alliance -- then an opposition group, now the most powerful player in the new Afghan government.
Burma, which displaced Afghanistan as the world's leading opium producer last year during the Taliban ban, produced an estimated 1,200 tons last year. No estimate is available on current production in Burma, but it appears likely that Afghanistan will regain the title this year.
The stuff will be showing up as heroin in consumer markets from Teheran and Karachi to Frankfurt and London later this year, after enriching local warlords, corrupt officials and trafficking organizations along the way.
|
|
PERMISSION to reprint or redistribute any or all of the contents of Drug War Chronicle (formerly The Week Online with DRCNet is hereby granted. We ask that any use of these materials include proper credit and, where appropriate, a link to one or more of our web sites. If your publication customarily pays for publication, DRCNet requests checks payable to the organization. If your publication does not pay for materials, you are free to use the materials gratis. In all cases, we request notification for our records, including physical copies where material has appeared in print. Contact: StoptheDrugWar.org: the Drug Reform Coordination Network, P.O. Box 18402, Washington, DC 20036, (202) 293-8340 (voice), (202) 293-8344 (fax), e-mail drcnet@drcnet.org. Thank you.
Articles of a purely educational nature in Drug War Chronicle appear courtesy of the DRCNet Foundation, unless otherwise noted.
StoptheDrugWar.org: the Drug Reform Coordination Network (DRCNet)
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
