Book Review

Opiate of the politicians

Opium: uncovering the politics of the poppy

Archaeological evidence of opium dates its use in Europe to 5,000 BC. Minoans, Egyptians, ancient Greeks, Sumerians, Arabs and Chinese have all, like modern Europeans, included the dried latex of Papaver somniferum in their pharmacopias. Inducing sleep, relieving pain, highly addictive, opium, like coca and tobacco, has no wild varieties, so long has its domesticated existence been intertwined with ours.

The first alkaloid, morphine, was created in 1805-06: in 1851 the intravenous syringe allowed modern medicine to relieve extreme pain in a few seconds – and create morphine addiction. Commercial heroin production began in 1898. It was at first thought to be non-addictive, a perfect substitute for morphine and opium. In the nineteenth century, the British fought two wars with China to foist opium on its population in exchange for silver with which to buy tea. Respectable wives and mothers in Britain and the US dosed themselves and their children with unprescribed, freely available opium and cocaine-tinctured medicines, and poets notoriously ate opium and saw visions: no one got upset. Queen Victoria used to put out a bottle of her favourite cocaine-laced wine for guests at Osborne. Sherlock Holmes favoured injecting cocaine in a 2 per cent solution.

Then the moral panic started. In 1914 the US passed the Harrison Act criminalising cocaine and all opiates. In 1971 President Nixon declared “the War on Drugs – a second Civil War”. Illicit opium production rose by 600 per cent between 1970 and 2006. Today, 95 per cent of the world’s illicit opium and heroin comes from Afghanistan, producing, the UN estimates, US$400 million annually for the Taliban. It also spawned the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) that, by 2006, cost $2.4 billion a year.

Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy has a Sorbonne PhD and is an expert on the politics of illicit drugs in Asia. This detailed, well-researched – although repetitive – account is uncompromising in its conclusions: the American war on drugs has been an expensive failure; and crop eradication hasn’t worked. Opium growing is a concomitant of weak or non-existent government, combined with civil war, poverty and food insecurity. Thirty years ago, Afghanistan produced virtually no opium. Then Iran and Turkey both banned poppy cultivation and Pakistan clamped down. The result was a boom in Afghan production, aided by the chaos of the Soviet occupation and the subsequent rule of the warlords. Iran has two million opiate users, in spite of 30 years of draconian repression by the Islamic Republic: its heroin and opium are smuggled in from Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Iran spends US$400 million a year on anti-drug border patrols and its armed gendarmerie have caught 3,500 smugglers over 20 years. The Chinese Communists managed to eradicate opium growing in China in the 1950s – at the cost of “tens of thousands imprisoned, thousands executed” as Chouvy puts it. Even the ayatollahs are not that ruthless, let alone NATO in Afghanistan. Crop subsititution – almonds, chilli peppers, flowers – has been effective in Lebanon – but requires stable markets and good infrastructure.

Licit poppies, for medicinal use, are widely grown and inexpensive – a kilo of Australian morphine costs US$56 to produce, as against US$450 for illegal Afghan heroin. To buy up the Afghan crop would be prohibitively expensive, and would help to fund the Taliban. Chouvy criticises US policy but proposes no alternatives. The economics of heroin consumption and distribution in the West are ignored. How much do the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and so on consume? How do the Turkish, Albanian, Kurdish, Italian and other mafias control the trade? What are the profits? What counter-strategies have been tried? Chouvy doesn’t tell us.

In Switzerland, a radical experiment is being closely observed by many other social democracies. Heroin use has been decriminalised, returning it to what it was before 1914 – a medical problem. Addicts are given free injections of heroin in clinics. This prevents the spread of HIV/Aids from shared needles, and effectively destroys the black market: no one pays dealers for expensive heroin when they can get it free from the Government. In theory, the price of illicit heroin collapses, and dealers turn their attention elsewhere. This costs the Government virtually nothing – US$56 a kilo for the heroin, the clinics and doctors being there anyway. It saves in police time and prevents theft, robbery and muggings by addicts. It doesn’t legalise heroin – no one can go out and buy it, and the free government heroin cannot leak into the black market as it is only issued in clinics, by injection. It is likely that many European social democracies may adopt this policy. It is probable that countries such as Iran and the United States, which equate heroin addiction with moral depravity, will not.

Dealers are motivated by profit: without it the trade collapses. The evidence is that when the Volstead Act banning alcohol in the US was repealed, bootleggers went broke. The naivety of legislative puritanism – thinking that passing laws banning things of which you disapprove means they will stop – has fuelled the modern illicit heroin trade. “What you want are results – what you get are consequences,” said US Secretary of State Robert McNamara, despairing of the Vietnam War. He might equally have been speaking of the “war on drugs”.

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