Wrong Approach to Opium in Afghanistan?

Anderson Cooper on CNN had a report this evening about how opium production is creating problems for the war in Afghanistan. The Afghan government, with the assistance of NATO, is attempting to suppress opium production, both because of the problems heroin (derived from opium) causes in the rest of the world, and because, as one of the opium farmers Cooper interviewed admitted, it was contrary to Islamic law.

The Taliban have apparently turned a blind eye to the violation of Islamic law to buy opium, and then resell it in the international market as a way to raise money for weapons. The more we push on the opium eradication effort, the more we push desperately poor farmers into the arms of the Taliban.

Now, some people would say that we should just abandon the ban on heroin, and wipe out the high profits of that business. That's not a realistic proposal, simply because there is no significant support for such a change. (Surveys that I have seen show at most 10% support for legalization of hard drugs such as heroin.) It also isn't clear to me that reducing the profitability of it on the streets of New York is going to have anywhere near as dramatic an effect on reducing the profitability at the earliest stages of production.

A more realistic, short-term proposal would be to buy the opium from the farmers. If we pay the farmers as much as the Taliban are paying for opium, it is not available for the Taliban to resell at a profit. We aren't going to get all of it, of course, but if we could even knock down the Taliban's share of the market to 30%, that would be a substantial reduction in Taliban revenue, as well as ending a source of hostility from Afghan opium farmers towards the Afghani government and NATO. The Taliban would also likely have to raise the price that they pay for opium, reducing their profit margin on resale.

How much will this cost? According to this December 2, 2006 Washington Post article, the 2006 opium crop was 5,644 metric tons. I'm not sure what the market price of that is today. This September 24, 2001 BBC report indicates that the pre-9/11 price that farmers received was $700 per kilo, which fell to $200 to $300 per kilo with the prospect of the Taliban being forced out of power, and the Afghani government abandoning its campaign to eradicate opium production. That's $700,000 per metric ton at the high end, or $200,000 per metric ton at the low end; we could buy the entire 2006 crop for somewhere between $1.1 billion and $4 billion--and that assumes that we could buy the entire crop, which we probably can't.

There is a legitimate use for opium; you can refine morphine from it, and that's still a legal, although controlled drug. I suspect that buying up the entire Afghan opium crop would give us far more morphine than we are going to use for many, many years (because current legal production apparently comes from about 1000 tons of opium, and unfortunately, morphine does not last forever). Maybe it would be more expensive than the current, legal channels, but what's the cost of defeating the Taliban in lives lost and equipment destroyed? We also don't have to run this opium farm price support program forever--just a few years, until we can decisively defeat the Taliban, and then slowly phase it out.