The Poppy Eradication Superthread-Merged

[Lockness]

Not that the NATO forces are directly involved in stopping poppy production.  Here is some background information on the cultivation of poppies since so much of the operations are occurring in poppy fields.

Just speculating here...thinking that its harvest time right now in Sept/Oct with a lot of incentives for drug lords to protect their fields until harvest is complete.

http://www.poppies.ws/poppies/opium-poppy-cultivation.html?act_vn

...
Opium poppies take about three months to mature, and the farmer may weed the fields once or twice during that time. When the plants are mature, the farmers start harvesting opium gum using primitive, unsanitary tools, made from whatever can be found nearby. The tools are often handed down from generation to generation.

Just before reaching maturity, the opium poppy plant produces a flower. After about a week, the flower petals fall off, leaving a capsule. Raw opium gum is harvested from this capsule. The surface of the capsule is cut, or "scored," with a knife containing three or four small blades, and the opium gum oozes out through these cuts in the opium poppy. The next day, the farmer scrapes the gum off the capsules with a flat tool called a scraper. Each capsule is usually scored in this manner three to five times, or until scoring produces no more gum. opium poppy fields contain thousands of opium poppy capsules, so harvesting is very labor intensive. Once the gum is collected, the farmer sets it out to dry for several days, then wraps it in banana leaf or plastic. The gum is stored until a trader comes to the village-opium gum has a very long shelf life and can gain value over time. After the harvesting process is complete, the capsules are cut from the stem, allowed to dry, then broken open so that the seeds inside the capsule can be used for next year's crop.

Refining raw opium poppy into heroin is a tedious, multistep process. Once the opium gum is transported to a refinery, it is converted into morphine, an intermediate product. This conversion is achieved primarily by chemical processes and requires several basic elements and implements. Boiling water is used to dissolve opium gum; 55-gallon drums are used for boiling vessels; and burlap sacks are used to filter and strain liquids. When dried, the morphine resulting from this initial process is pressed into bricks. The conversion of morphine bricks into heroin is also primarily a chemical process. The main chemical used is acetic anhydride, along with sodium carbonate, activated charcoal, chloroform, ethyl alcohol, ether, and acetone. The two most commonly produced heroin varieties are No. 3 heroin, or smoking heroin, and No. 4 heroin, or injectable heroin.
...

Anyone add to info from your experience in Afghanistan?

 

[Trinity]

Anyone add to info from your experience in Afghanistan?

Probably not.  Last time I checked we weren't over there making opium.  ;D ;D

 

[Lockness]

LMAO

How bout doing a recce through a poppy field and getting all gummed up. =)

 

[HItorMiss]

I can talk alot about my experience's in Afghanistan, but I'm not really sure what it is your asking  ???

 

[silentbutdeadly]

I have some pics of us in the Helmand province with regard to poppies. If i can remember how to post them !

 

[Lockness]

I can talk alot info about my experience's in Afghanistan, but I'm not really sure what it is your asking  ???

Well I was thinking there might be some anecdotal stories about conducting operations in and around poppy fields, tripped out farmers, or taliban etc.  When Bush says that "he wants to smoke Al Qaeda out of their holes," it kinda presents a new meaning when you guys on the front lines are presented a favourable wind direction, acres of marijuana fields, and Taliban hiding in them.  Potheads are not exactly known for their motivation or will to fight unless it involves searching for food. 

Sorry, I don't mean to make light of what you guys experienced, its just that there is an information void when it comes to what its actually like on the ground.  I'm sure when you get back home and are talking to your non-army friends, they ask you: "So what was it like?"  I can imagine its like "Hrmm, where do I begin?" followed by a flood of images and silence.  When Infidel-6 names Afghanistan as Asscrackistan, it surprisingly invokes a lot of imaginery of the sights and smells of what the place could be like.  In the email of the PPLCI FOO "Panjawai and Beyond,"  we (i.e. JQ public) get some real insight of what it is like to be in the thick of it for 3 weeks. Details such as having to wear your same clothes for days/weeks, covered in dried sweat and being so exhausted you can fall asleep in the dirt with "sand fleas" biting.  The Canadian environment is just so completely opposite of Afghanistan but so much the same if you replace dried sweat with frozen sweat, dirt and sand with mud and snow, sand fleas with mosquitoes.  Is it any wonder that Canadian soldiers can maintain a high morale and thrive when operating in places like this. For me I can't stand the heat, 60C daytime temperatures is just unfathomable, hell anything above 25C is too damn hot.  Give me minus 20C weather and I'm loving it.

I guess what I am asking for is more stories.  The army is described as hurry up and wait with most of your time in preparation and waiting.  The media is pretty good about reporting about front line action, body counts, military stats etc but are not really interested in publishing day to day stuff.  Blogs have to some degree filled this void, but quite typically we only get to see the life inside the base near a computer and internet hookup. 

I would think this information could be really practical for the people who have yet to go over there either as part of the military, NGO's or civilians in the PRT's.  This past summer, I did get to watch from afar, for a few hours, some canadian military training exercises outside Kamloops.  I'm guessing that having the troops running around all day in their battle dress in dusty 40C heat was for prepping to go to Afghanistan.  It wasn't until I saw the military helicopters flying around my home town that, I really became curious of what was happening with the Afghanistan mission.  Now I'm hooked now that I found Army.ca!

The reason I asked about poppies to begin with was I was guessing the stories might be humorous, wouldn't cause operational security issues, or cause stress from invoking images of front line action.  The way I see it, poppies are really a litmus test on the health of Afghanistan and provide a real quantitative measure of how Afghanistan is progressing.  The above linked article suggested that farmers see very little profit from the actual poppy production so therefore should be willing to grow new crops of higher value or yield.  The reason why the farmers grow poppies is they intimately already know how, have the fields and seeds, can sell nearly all of their product, the product can be reduced to small high concentrated and high valued bricks to make transportation to market so much simplier than other bulky products, and has a long storage life so no worries about spoilage. 

So burning fields and aerial spraying of herbicides that US is reported to be conducting is a complete waste of time and money and its only creating security issues from pissed off farmers who can't feed their families now that their crop was destroyed and take it out on the nearest foreign soldier.  Thank god NATO recognizes this and is staying out of the drug interventions and is rather concentrating on security so that NGO's have a chance to retrain farmers to grow other high valued crops like saffron and cumin as one article states.  This will only work if the road system is in place so that bulk goods can be transported from the hinterlands to the cities, a market system is in place so that the goods can be sold in a timely manner, and a financial system is in place so that farmers can finance the restart of next years crop.  (How can you tell I have a business degree.)  Of course this whole system falls apart with NGO's are being killed in the fields.  So it all comes down to security as the most important first step and that's where we are today.

Then we have critics like the NDP who just do not seem to get it.  You know there is some intelligent people on the left, I'm guessing they are critical because well thats the party line they've been fed, or just have not educated themselves with whats going on the ground before they start spouting off.  One day the light will turn on, and then we have to listen to the spin of what they really wanted done. <puke>

"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter."
- Winston Churchill

Lockness

 

[boondocksaint]

the video of us in Hyderabad has all the opium edited out at the moment, but we busted about 15 million in black tar, it was eating through the bags and burning our hands and.....wait where am i.. well it does burn, and all we had to move it in was plastic bags that kept ripping,

i'll post some pics later of what it looked like, as well as the captured weapons from the drug fighters we got during the fight, those guys fought pretty damn hard to hold on to their dope, but no joy 8)

 

[The Bread Guy]

Those nice "just regulate the stuff" Senlis folks seem to be making inroads..... 

Shared in accordance with the "fair dealing" provisions, Section 29, of the Copyright Act.

Morphine-free poppy suggested to counter Afghan heroin boom
Philip Dine, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 28 Dec 06
Article Link

After a year of escalating Afghan heroin production, calls are mounting for a shift in U.S. policy aimed at turning Afghanistan's poppy into an economic asset by using it to produce medicinal painkillers.

Backers of the proposal include leading scientists and economists, as well as some in Congress. The Bush administration is skeptical.

Rep. Russ Carnahan, D-Mo., plans to use his recently acquired seat on the House International Relations Committee to bring the matter up when lawmakers convene next month.

"You can't just cut off the poppies because that's the livelihood of the people who live there," Carnahan said Thursday. "But providing them with alternative legal markets for pain-relief medication is a way to help cut back on that heroin supply."

Carnahan hopes to drive these points home by using testimony from law-enforcement officers, drug abuse experts and scientists from St. Louis, where officials say an influx of Afghan heroin is causing problems.

"We need to have a better way of dealing with the problem, since it's proving to be so deadly here in St. Louis and in the Midwest," he said.

In backing the idea, Carnahan and others cite its success elsewhere.

Thirty years ago, U.S. officials fashioned a treaty that turned a looming narcotics threat in Turkey and India into a part of their legitimate economies using poppies to make legal medication. Those nations export raw opiates from which painkillers are produced by companies such as Mallinkcrodt of St. Louis.

Australia has a thriving trade from altered, morphine-free poppies that cannot be easily used to produce heroin. The painkillers derived from a compound it produces, called thebaine, are potent and in demand throughout much of the world.

Congressional frustration has grown as Afghanistan's illicit poppy cultivation, which has exploded since the U.S. invasion, has jumped 60 percent over the past year. It now produces 90 percent of the world's heroin, while helping fund the Taliban insurgency.

But the administration sees problems with a proposal to produce legal poppies.

Tom Schweich, a senior State Department official who is spearheading U.S. efforts to curb Afghan narcotics, said he welcomed "creative ideas" but found this one to be "not realistic."

He said Afghan farmers wouldn't have enough economic incentive to turn away from illegal poppy cultivation. He added that Afghanistan lacks the required business infrastructure for processing, manufacturing and distribution; and that the oversight needed to prevent illicit drug trafficking would be near impossible.

"You really need to keep it illegal and eradicate it," Schweich said.

Beyond administration concerns, there also would be agricultural challenges in implementing such a program, and likely opposition from nations now reaping profits from the legal poppy trade.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported in May that police and health officials in Missouri and Illinois were noting increased arrests, seizures of contraband and drug overdoses related to Afghan heroin. This week, law enforcement officials in Orange County, Calif., said a sharp rise in Afghan heroin is the top drug problem they face.

Carnahan's involvement stems in part from a meeting his staff recently had with Percy Menzies, who runs an addiction recovery center in St. Louis, and Dan Duncan, head of the St. Louis chapter of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse.

"The amount of middle-class people using heroin in the St. Louis area the last couple of years just horrifies me," Duncan said. "It's long past time we take a good hard look at some new strategies."

Menzies, president of Assisted Recovery Centers in St. Louis, spent 18 years at Dupont Pharmaceuticals, where he worked with poppy-derived substances to treat heroin addiction and helped establish treatment centers in five states.

"For the first time, we have more people addicted to heroin than alcohol in my clinic, and these are suburban kids from St. Louis County. More and more Afghan heroin is coming in," Menzies says.

Vanda Faber-Brown is an expert in the role of narcotics in illicit economics and military conflicts. Faber-Brown, who works at Harvard University and the Brookings Institution, says convincing Afghan farmers to change their brand of poppy would be easier than trying to wipe out poppy fields altogether, destroying their livelihood.

"Essentially, opium has replaced money in key day-to-day activities in the countryside," Faber-Brown says. Poppy's domination of Afghanistan's economy, between 30 and 50 percent of economic activity, dwarfs anything previously seen in Colombia, Bolivia or Burma, she says.

Toni Kutchan is a biochemist who leads an internationally renowned research team on medicinal plants, including poppy, at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis. She spent two decades in Germany, where she also headed research teams in plant biochemistry.

"The idea of creating a trade for morphine-free opium is very worthwhile and needs to be thought through carefully," she said. "It should not be pushed off the table by a knee-jerk reaction against it."

The Australian poppy plants are an easily achieved mutant, but there could be a legal issue of patents, Kutchan said. If that posed problems because the Australians did not want to share it, the same plants could be created by genetic modification, albeit with more difficulty, she says.

A related option is to bring Afghanistan into a 1970s treaty reached with U.S. prompting that allowed Turkey and India to keep growing poppies as long as the morphine produced was sold to companies that make legal painkillers. Experts say that while this wouldn't require changing the type of poppies in Afghanistan, the strict regulation needed so the morphine isn't turned into heroin could be a problem, given Afghanistan's ineffective government.

The search for a new approach is largely prompted by the failure of current U.S. policies to stem Afghan poppy production.

James Dobbins, who was President Bush's first special envoy to Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, said proposals for a morphine-free poppy should be closely examined.

"I'd certainly like to see a study on how feasible that is," said Dobbins, who now directs the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corp. "I do think that the current U.S. and international effort is at best a kind of a band aid that can't have more than a marginal impact."

Dr. Charles Schuster headed the National Institute on Drug Abuse under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and is now director of the Neuro-Sciences Institute at Loyola University in Chicago.

"I think the government should give serious consideration to attempting to implement that type of program," he said, adding that current U.S. policies alone "are never going to be the solution for this."

 

[zipperhead_cop]

Looks like a great idea, but if big pharmaceutical can't get a big piece of it, wait and see the idea get shot to hell. 
And not being a biologist/pharmacist, wouldn't you want the morphine in tact to create legitimate pain killers? 

 

[Klc]

I wondered that too, but the article seems to imply that another compound in the mutant poppies is used, and allegedly harder to use illicitly.

 

[The Bread Guy]

I read the piece the same way re:  pain meds would still be possible with the "nicer" poppy.

Seems some Brits are climbing aboard the bandwagon as well, only with a slightly different spin....

Let's buy up all the heroin, says MP
Selous says direct action in Afghanistan would help ease UK problems
Bedford Today (UK), 29 Dec 06
Article Link

The UK government should buy up the heroin crop in Afghanistan and use it around the world for pain relief, according to South West Beds MP Andrew Selous.  Speaking in the House of Commons he said to fellow MPs: "Why, given that heroin can have legitimate medical uses, cannot we buy up the Afghan heroin crop and use it around the world for pain relief? That would stop it flooding into this country illegally. We need much serious thought on that issue."  He said that the recent events in Ipswich - where five prostitutes were murdered - highlighted the problem.  Mr Selous stated: "I read the biographies of the women who were so brutally and horrifically murdered and I cannot have been the only one to be struck by the fact that they were all heroin addicts. It is a problem that affects all our constituencies - there will not be a single Member of Parliament who does not have a heroin problem in their constituency.  Given that we know that 90 per cent of the heroin on UK streets comes from Afghanistan and that we have a major military presence there, it is extraordinary that we cannot do more to stop the poppy crop ending up here." ....

 

[bilton090]

    +1, We should buy up the crop, all of it !, then the druglords have not a thing to use, supply dries up, one more problem gone !

 

[armyvern]

Shared in accordance with the "fair dealing" provisions, Section 29, of the Copyright Act.

Morphine-free poppy suggested to counter Afghan heroin boom
Philip Dine, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 28 Dec 06
http://www.bedfordtoday.co.uk/ViewArticle2.aspx?SectionID=543&ArticleID=1945881

...buy up the heroin crop in Afghanistan and use it around the world for pain relief...

Hmmm, I seem to recall that this very suggestion was brought up on Army.ca a few months ago...

 

[bilton090]

Shared in accordance with the "fair dealing" provisions, Section 29, of the Copyright Act.

Morphine-free poppy suggested to counter Afghan heroin boom
Philip Dine, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 28 Dec 06
http://www.bedfordtoday.co.uk/ViewArticle2.aspx?SectionID=543&ArticleID=1945881

Hmmm, I seem to recall that this very suggestion was brought up on Army.ca a few months ago...

                  +1, We are beating a dead horse !

 

[Bruce Monkhouse]

However, if there is still no security all we have done is cut out the hardest part of the operation [conversion and shipment] and made the money much easier for the bad guys to get......

 

[armyvern]

However, if there is still no security all we have done is cut out the hardest part of the operation [conversion and shipment] and made the money much easier for the bad guys to get......

I think Army.ca posters solved that problem too (at least in the previous thread!!).  ;D

 

[Genetk44]

    +1, We should buy up the crop, all of it !, then the druglords have not a thing to use, supply dries up, one more problem gone !

I remember about 10-15 years ago, the late Peter Jennings of ABC news, offered the same idea about the cocaine crop in South America. He pointed out that the cost of buying up all the coca production directly from the farmers would be far less than the amount of money the US was spending on funding the DEA, it would cut off the supply for the bad boys and yet it would keep the farmers not only happy but friendly to the authorities. It makes perfect sense....except there are too many vested interests in keeping the status quo.

 

[The Bread Guy]

I remember about 10-15 years ago, the late Peter Jennings of ABC news, offered the same idea about the cocaine crop in South America. He pointed out that the cost of buying up all the coca production directly from the farmers would be far less than the amount of money the US was spending on funding the DEA, it would cut off the supply for the bad boys and yet it would keep the farmers not only happy but friendly to the authorities. It makes perfect sense....except there are too many vested interests in keeping the status quo.

...not to mention "infrastructure costs" to get all that money spent 

 

[DBA]

Production would increase rather dramatically and any attempt to curb how much you buy would mean the illicit buyers would be back in business. It's just not that simple.

 

[Kirkhill]

I'm with those that think this is a good idea.  At the same time though there will always be a need for Excisemen and Revenooers.