All heroine that is available in Europe is of Afghan origin
As a matter of fact, it is strange that the drug commerce has increased lately, especially against the background of two large-scale operations that the USA conducted in five years. There is no need to talk a lot about the danger that drugs pose to the modern society. There have been a lot of things said and read about it. Yet, this evil is spread very fast in the world, imperiling national security of dozens of countries. Russia is not an exception on the list of those countries, unfortunately.
However, one may approach the drug distribution issue in a different way. There has not been much attention paid to the fact that prices on drugs go down in Europe and Russia after the completion of operations that are conducted at USA’s leading role. Why does it happen so?
It is an open secret that the incumbent Afghan government with Khamid Karzai at the head does not do anything to struggle with the drug commerce. There can be a lot of explanations found about it: there is no energy for that, the government can not control the entire territory of the country, Afghanistan suffers from devastation, and so on and so forth. It would probably be possible to establish law and order there, when everything becomes normal. For the time being, Afghanistan takes the leading position in terms of opium production. This was informed by the United Nations.
Specialists of the UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention said that Afghan peasants gathered about three thousand four hundred tons of opium from their poppy fields last year. The total square of those fields is 57 thousand hectares. According to the aerospace photography data, Afghans sowed poppy on 23 thousand hectares last autumn. This will be the harvest of the current year. Seventy percent of opium and almost all heroine that is available in the streets of European towns and cities is of the Afghan origin.
The situation is rather bad in another region, in Kosovo. The USA used to take a lot of efforts to save the freedom-loving Albanian nation from Milosevic’s tyranny. America turned a blind eye on the fact that the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army purchased its arms with the money that was obtained from drug sales. By the way, the American press mentioned that too. The Washington Times, for example, published an article, in which it was asserted that the financial position of the Kosovo Liberation Army was based on heroine sales. A year before, the US Department of State categorized the Kosovo Liberation Army as a terrorist organization that was funded by the drug commerce. Bin Laden’s Al-Qaida was on the very same list. Yet, Bin Laden has to hide somewhere in Afghan mountains, while the Kosovo Liberation Army plays the leading role in Kosovo’s political life. It is worth mentioning here that the army is rather good at that: they call Kosovo the European Colombia already.
No matter, what attitude people might have towards Slobodan Milosevic or the Taliban regime, it should be said here that both Milosevic and Talibs attempted to struggle with drug dealers. One has to be careful about the Taliban movement, though. Talibs banned growing opium poppy, although they did not ban selling it. To crown it all, opium was sold at price of $30 per one kilo prior to the ban, while its price went up to $700 after the ban. By the way, the Northern Alliance did not have an version to selling drugs either, although the alliance was considered to be an anti-Taliban force.
In general, it just so happened that the forces that America supported were guilty of large-scale drug commerce on numerous occasions. The leadership of the United States of America turned a blind eye on that fact. There is nothing strange about that, really. Heroine is delivered not to American, but to European cities. Consequently, this is the problem of Europe, not of the USA. However, Europeans will not be able to cope with the drug commerce issue. It is the USA that might help Europe, since that it is allegedly the only superpower in the world. The American government does not hurry to do that, though. No wonder – there is such a horrible enemy in Baghdad at the moment.
Vasily Bubnov PRAVDA.Ru
Translated by Dmitry Sudakov
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