A New Poppy Policy

Positive news in Afghanistan, and possibly a hopeful indicator for a new trend in the United States’ global War on Drugs: The United States will shift its strategy in its effort to halt the banned trade in poppy, which is used to make heroin, from a focus on eradicating the illegal poppy fields to instead providing financing for Afghan farmers to use their lands to grow alternative crops.

U.S. Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke told the G8 meeting in Trieste, Italy, on Saturday that their prior tact of destroying Afghanistan’s poppy fields has been a “failure.” Holbrooke continued: “Spraying the crops just penalizes the farmer and they grow crops somewhere else. The hundreds of millions of dollars we spend on crop eradication has not had any damage on the Taliban," according to a BBC News report. "On the contrary, it has helped them recruit. This is the least effective program ever.”

As a freelance journalist, I have written in the past on the United States efforts to combat coca leaf growing in Bolivia. The United States has similarly failed with their aggressive push to wipe out coca fields in this South American country. Bolivia’s coca growers, like the poppy growers in Afghanistan, just move on to other locales when illegal fields are destroyed. The unpopular U.S. strategy may have even contributed to helping the leader of the coca growers, Evo Morales, become president of Bolivia in 2006.

Long-term, United States efforts also come up against Bolivian traditions. Some coca fields are legal in Bolivia. It's been a sacred part of indigenous culture for centuries. Coca leaf by itself has not proved harmful to health (in order to transform the leaves into cocaine it requires a lengthy process involving several chemicals). Indeed, some say unprocessed coca leaf is actually benefical to health and its most popularly consumed in Bolivia as a tea called “mate de coca.”