James Corbett – Great news for poppy farmers in Afghanistan: a mysterious, brand new strain of poppy seed has appeared on the scene this year promising a better crop than ever before. According to farmers in poppy-rich Helmand and Kandahar provinces, the seeds appeared out of nowhere, delivered to them by the same drug traffickers who provide them with tools, fertilizer, farming advice and cash advances at the start of each growing season and come back to collect the crop at the end of each season. As Gul Mohammad Shukran, head of Kandahar’s anti-narcotics department, explains, this new strain of seed is expected to produce “better drug plants, which require less water and have a faster growth time.”

It goes without saying that this news is even better for the mysterious seed-suppliers who end up taking the harvested opium and transporting it off to foreign countries to be processed into heroin and sold on the black market. But it works out best of all for the treaty organization that invaded the country 14 years ago and has overseen record bumper poppy harvest after record bumper poppy harvest year after year after year after year after year ever since.

That the NATO forces in Afghanistan are protecting the poppy crop is not even a point of controversy. Five years ago Lt. Colonel Brian Christmas of the U.S. Marines went on Fox News to lament that it “may grind in his gut,” but the NATO troops just have to help the farmers cultivate the poppy crop otherwise the farmers would turn against them.

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And just like that, the entire “war on drugs” is exposed for the lie that we already knew that it was. Afghanistan produces 90% of the world’s opium from which heroin is derived. The poppies from which that opium is collected are protected by U.S. marines and others in the full knowledge that this will end up on the streets of countries around the world as heroin. Continue reading →