by James Glaser
August 20, 2002

Come on now, what is going on here? All we hear about is this long drought in Afghanistan and how they need food supplies for their people. The crops are in this year and what are they growing? Poppies, not for the seed, but to make opium for our American market

We are not talking about small scale growing here, no the Afghans are growing about 225,000 acres of the stuff and they have harvested between 150,000 and 175,000 acres already.

These figures come from the UN World Food Program, that is assessing all Afghan crops and food supplies. The farmer can get $6,400 an acre for poppies or take the $500 per acre that Afghan President Hamid Karzai will give them if they destroy their crop. Well duh.

In the 1990s, Afghanistan was supplying 70% of the worlds opium which is turned into Heroin, for the European and United States market. The Taliban, banned the growing of the poppy and production fell to about 4 % of the former total. Now with America's defeat of the Taliban, poppy planting has covered tens of thousands of acres again.

America has the most powerful Air Force the world has ever known flying all over Afghanistan and that same Air force has incredible stockpiles of weapons, including, Napalm. If just every day those planes dropped any unused ordinance on those poppy fields, of course I never even thought if maybe these 225,000 acres are hidden, but what the heck, the UN knows where they are.

That Napalm would do a number on those fields and that would be better public relations than hitting wedding parties. Of course, just maybe there is a pay off for the Bush administration in letting these poppies grow. Give us the poppies and we will give America that pipe line they have always wanted. Could be.

If my math is right, there are over 350 square miles of poppies growing in Afghanistan. We have troops looking for terrorists all over that country. Lets give our troops some pictures of poppies and maybe they can find some of these fields and call in air strikes. Our War on Terrorism could then "dove tail" into our War on Drugs. Plus President Bush has been telling us how drugs, make money for the terrorists, so it is a win, win. Oh Yeah, I forgot about that pipe line. I guess we will have to suffer the Heroin if we want that.