ABC News: Use Afghan Opium Crops to Make Morphine, NGO Says

Opium from Afghanistan, the world’s biggest source of heroin, should instead be used to legally produce morphine and codeine, a drugs think tank said on Wednesday in a suggestion cautiously endorsed by Afghanistan.

It’s a solution so simple and elegant it’s hard to believe someone hasn’t thought of it sooner. The opium farmers get to keep their livelihoods and you put paid to drug-related warlordism.

But on further thought I can see pitfalls: The system would have to be pretty heavily monitored to prevent “leakages” onto the heroin market. Plus, you’d expect the price of heroin to rocket as the supply dried up which would make such leakages more profitable - you’re back to the blackmarket and the opportunity for corruption within the system. We’ve seen how baser human instincts got in the way of a laudable project like the Iraqi oil-for-food programme.

Just what happens to the heroin market in the UK would be difficult to guess; higher prices and the drug cut with more crap to make it go further, perhaps?

And will the Afghan farmers get a fair price for their crop? Or do they become just like the coffee producers - paid poverty wages to produce a commodity for western consumers.

Let’s hope there’s some joined up thinking on this.