yazeez

You know when you get in this research mood, probably because you have no better way to spend your time, but anyways, you read about something, then try to find more and more info about it, well thats what happened last night, the results are very interesting, to me at least.

I came across this article on Forbes. It talks about how Afghanistan is breaking the opium (later processed into heroin) production “record.” I thought to myself, thats weird. A country thats under the control of US and some NATO forces being able to break all these records. Then I started reading and remembering (in my mind) of how the Taliban were actually burning the poppy fields in Afghanistan during 2000. The punished people who farmed it, sometimes with death. Look at the graph below for a clearer picture (the red line is Afghanistan’s production, ignore the other lines)

In mid 2001 “there was basically no opium produced in Afghanistan, though that nation usually led the world in production of the drug.”

Interesting…

Afghanistan last year accounted for 92 percent of global opium production, up from 70 percent in 2000 and 52 percent a decade earlier. With the higher yields, global opium production increased 43 percent between 2005 and 2006.

This year 457,135 acres are producing opium Afghanistan, that’s about 1850 square kilometers. To get a better picture, its about 3 times the size of Bahrain!

With heroin being sold somewhere between $65,000 to $110,000 (according to various sources online) per kilo (prices are in the US), there’s a heck of a lot of money to be made. I don’t even wanna know how many kilos are produced each year, but I would guess the money would be enough to fund something like a war. Maybe?

Here are a few interesting articles that are worth reading if you were interested with the subject.

• President Bush Has Made Afghanistan Safe For Opium Production Once Again
• Britain is protecting the biggest heroin crop of all time