With the Taliban resurgent, and with British casualties mounting, and with more illegal opium being grown than ever before, it is time to look again at one obvious solution. Surely we should be pursuing the argument first proposed three years ago by the Senlis council: to see if we can work with Afghan villages and farmers to develop a legitimate medical market for their crops. We have an ageing Western population; we are making infinite advances in fighting disease and in prolonging life. We are therefore going to be in need of ever more painkilling drugs. The people of Afghanistan have shown they can grow those drugs in quantity. Surely we should be helping them to turn those poppies into medicine.

www.telegraph.co.uk/co...istan.html

BoJo, just four years behind the times: www.poppyformedicine.net/

msr

MSR, in theory it's a great plan, the problem is they grow much more than we could use. There has been very targetted work at getting people into drug treatment and who knows maybe less people will be using Heroin. I wonder what might happen to drug treatment services should we have a change of govt.
Methadone is a very cheap drug and if more people are on Methadone and using less Heroin maybe we'll have even bigger supplies and a cheaper product on the streets. It could be then that we get younger and younger addicts due to Heroin being cheaper.

So what do you propose?

It's a brilliant plan! The problem is that nobody's got the bottle to initiate it. An even better plan would be to legalise heroin and use the dough saved on the "war on drugs" to equip the Armed Forces.

Methadone may be comparatively cheap, but it's an absolutely disastrous drug and far inferior to heroin. Just as an example:

Withdrawal time from heroin: 4 - 5 days
Withdrawal time from methadone: up to six weeks.

MsG

How much would it cost to buy the entire crop ? Buying an entire years crop from the farmers would not cost too much and yet would have a major impact on the amount of Heroin that is available (if the 90% figure is correct). We could even go halfers with the Yanks. It's worth a punt as nothing the Govt have tried in the past has had any resounding success.

It would also have the added bonus of denting the Talibs cash flow (if only for a year). If its a success then do it again the following year. Of course Heroin production in other countries would increase but no doubt it would take time to set up the smuggling infrastructure to get the product to the UK.

It does sound like a great plan, but I can see a problem with guarding it. We get the farmers to grow something that we can then use, but then the Taliban just jump onto those crops as a means of making money.

They armoured farmers could be assigned guarding duties at least!

Current thinking is for maintenance based treatment, Methadone is a llong acting drug and so when someone is stabilised on a dose, they rarely have to increase. Heroin is a short acting drug and so doses need increasing often and that is why so much crime is committed by people addicted to it.
Methadone is also used for pain in some circumstances and that is why it was originally developed. I disagree that it's a disatrous drug.

The EU has lots of experience in getting farmers to grow crops that no-one needs, in order to further other aims (e.g. the retention of French or Italian rural lifestyles). As you really only have to persuade the German and English taxpayers that this is a good use of their EU money, it should be achievable.

It wouldn't be the work of a genius to buy the stuff, use what we want and use the rest for landfill, put it in concrete blocks and sink it, or just store it in Hartlepool for all I care.

It's the next two steps in the story that matter. Are we prepared to resource the increase in crime that will come when the price of heroin goes through the roof? And are we prepared to resource the increase in violence in AFG when the Taliban fight back against the removal of their source of income?

The crop for the year 2000 from Afghanistan was 1670 tonnes it takes 10 tons of morphine to make 1 ton of heroin. I don't have more up to date figures with me at the moment but it does give you an idea of scale.

Pennies: www.poppyformedicine.net and it would be self financing

If I knew the answer i'd probably be quite rich. I'm never sure whether legalising heroin is a good idea or not. There is currently a trial where people are being given Diamorphine (Heroin) and I understand it has had some success, the results have not yet been published as far as I am aware.
I wondered some time ago, when would we start giving people prescriptions for Heroin, would we have opiate naive people popping to see the GP and asking for it, rather than buy it? I guess we'd have a lot of drug related deaths if we did. Prescribing pharmaceutical grade heroin would of course vastly reduce the cost of treating people who have HIV or Hepatitis C through injecting/sharing works.

As regards drugs in palliative care, there are many more synthetic drugs available these days but we are of course probably always will be reliant on Morphine and diamorphine. The americans I believe do not prescribe diamorphine it's not licenced.

The idea of buying up the poppy crop misses the point. The Taliban need money, so they force farmers to grow poppies for heroine and use the money to fund themselves. If maize would make more money it would be maize. If we were to pay the farmers direct for their crops, the Taliban would just extort the money from the farmers. Poppies are not the problem, its stemming the funding to the Taliban that needs solving. Do you not think if it was as easy as buying up the crop someone would have tried it by now?

Where would it end, would they plant even more and want more money?
Does paying for the crop encourage more and better production?

But no-one has tried it, so we will never know.

If the farmers in Afghan had a regular supply of income, they would not turn to the Taliban.

msr

Does pouring in massive amounts of soldiers and associated military hardware reduce it?

Seemingly not, then I did say I didn't know the answer. I do think we are going in the right direction with drug users though. The service I manage has recently started a service for younger people. The adult drug users often say they started using when they were 13 yrs old and upwards.
I'm not sure whether it will be a sad day or a time to rejoice when I write my first prescription so a kid can collect his/her Methadone and then catch the bus to school.

Why not kill every heroin addict on the planet. Hey presto! No more market for opium! It's not as if heroin addicts deserve to live.

turning to the taliban is not the problem, as has been pointed out unless we threatened to do them serious harm the farmers will always work for the talib as all the money in the world from us will not stop the taliban doing nasty stuff to them/families etc. we cant protect them 24/7 and we wont be there forever, I dont blame them from taking the safer option.

Thailand shot hundreds of Heroin users, guess what it didn't work. The PM who was ousted ? Thaksin shinawatra ordered it.

Buy the whole crop, use what we need for medical purposes, then distroy the rest. While I could care less about junkies, the crimes they commit to fund their pathetic "lifestyle" harm real people. I'm willing to bet that buying up the Afghan poppy crop would cost less than what we spend on dealing with drug related crime.

Once we have stopped the flow of heroin, we can start to wean the junkies off methadon; the scum will not be able to go back on heroin since there won't be any left.

Last edited by Werewolf on Mon Jul 13, 2009 9:44 am; edited 1 time in total