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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: thames_sider who wrote (11714)	11/27/2001 11:58:22 AM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

if we're serious about restricting heroin, we need to provide a good alternative for the farmers - and the warlords - who depend on this source of money. I remember thinking as a young radical kid that drugs should be legalized, just to stop criminals from pushing them. Now that I am of "the establishment" age with teenage kids of my own, I feel exactly the same. Tony Blair and George Bush have an open chequebook to legalize all drugs (sold under government control, with enforced public education plus monitors) as far as I'm concerned. They also have open chequebook to summarily execute any drug pushing warlord they wish, with or with out a trial. This is a war too. Bread and wheat are going to be the currency of choice in Afghanistan this winter. Beats "drug money soup" and "poppy pie" for taste and sustenance.

To: thames_sider who wrote (11714)	11/28/2001 11:53:39 AM
From: Thomas M.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

IOW, if we're serious about restricting heroin ... ... then we could start by restricting the CIA. How do you think they fund their covert wars? serendipity.magnet.ch Afghanistan: <<< His analysis makes clear that both Burma and Afghanistan have attained this status thanks to the activities of American secret services. "The increasing opium harvests in Burma and Afghanistan (...) were largely the product of CIA covert operations. Just as CIA support for the Nationalist Chinese (KMT) troops in the Shan State had increased Burma's opium crop in the 1950s, so the agencies aid to the mujaheddin guerrillas in the 1980s expanded opium production in Afghanistan and linked Pakistan's nearby laboratories to the world market" (McCoy 1991, pp 440-441). McCoy has described how, during the 1980s, Afghanistan became Europe's main opium supplier, because CIA covert operations transformed southern Asia from a self-contained opium zone into a major supplier of heroin for the world market: "CIA intervention provided the political protection and logistic linkages that joined Afghanistan's poppy fields to heroin markets in Europe and America" (McCoy 1991, p. 441). Although the Americans have left, Afghanistan, just like Burma before it, has remained a major heroin supplier for the world market. >>> cedro-uva.org Tom