[Firestarter]

I've previously posted about the one true narco-state in the world - Afghanistan - where the US, UK and Netherlands brought "peace, freedom and democracy" with bombs and heroin-trafficking politicians.

The Mujahideen that later evolved into the Taliban and Al-Qaeda were forced to pay the CIA for the arms, and they could only do so by growing poppy.
Afghanistan produced about 100 tons of opium annually in the 1970s. By 1989-1990, that amount of opium had become 2,000 tons a year, which was already about 75% of the world’s illicit opium trade.

Afghans really don't have a choice, poverty rose from 9.1 million in 2007 to 19.3 million in 2016 (peace, freedom and democracy).
It is now estimated that Afghanistan produces more than 90% of the world’s illicit opium. Since 2008, opium is responsible for more than half of the country’s GDP. To put that in perspective, even in Colombia cocaine never accounted for more than 3% of its GDP.
Last year, Afghanistan's poppy cultivation grew by over a third.

Matthew Hoh, a former captain in the U.S. Marine Corps in Afghanistan who resigned in protest over the continued occupation of Afghanistan in 2009, said that NATO forces were guarding poppy production and that they didn't destroy the poppy fields because Afghan officials were afraid that their poppy fields would be destroyed:

They were afraid that, if they went to aerial eradication, the U.S. pilots would just eradicate willy nilly and a lot of their own poppy fields would be hit.
...
NATO forces were more or less guarding poppy fields and poppy production, under the guise of counterinsurgency. The logic was ‘we don’t want to take away the livelihoods of the people.’ But really, what we were doing at that point was protecting the wealth of our friends in power in Afghanistan.

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Hoh also explained that local heroin producer Gul Agha Sherzai was paid by the US to eradicate his competitors’ crops in Nangarhar Province:

We literally gave the guy $10 million in cash for rubbing out his competition. If you were going to write a movie about this, they’d say ‘This is too far fetched. No one is going to believe this. Nothing is this insane or stupid.’ But that is the way it is.

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Just about all the politicians installed into power in "democratic" Afghanistan were associated with the heroin trade, including Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s brother Ahmed Wali, who has been accused of working for the CIA.

Between 2005 and 2015, the number of adult Afghan drug users jumped from 900,000 to 2.4 million, with around 9% of the adult population addicted to opioids (including heroin).
In neighbouring Pakistan, the number of heroin addicts went from practically none in the late 1970s to over 1.2 million by 1985. In 2013, it was estimated that almost 7 million Pakistanis use drugs, with nearly 2.5 million abusing heroin or other opioids. Around 700 people die per day from overdoses.
Iran has an estimated at 2 to 3 million opioid users, despite the extremely harsh penalties for drug offences.

The U.S. government has a long history of being involved with dope dealing.
In Colombia, it worked with President Alvaro Uribe on a "drug war", while U.S. documents identified Uribe as one of Colombia’s most important drug traffickers, employee of the Medellin Cartel and a “close personal friend” of drugs kingpin Pablo Escobar.

The U.S. government still supports Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, who is also connected to the cocaine trade. Earlier this year, a U.S. court sentenced Hernandez’s brother Tony to life in prison for drug smuggling, while Juan himself was identified as co-conspirator in the case: https://www.mintpressnews.com/cia-afghan...um/277780/
(https://archive.is/XVFj0)


This was reported on 31 March of this year on the booming poppy cultivation under the Taliban regime...

It is not surprising that the Taliban government today has started to take draconian measures to crack down on opiate addiction in society and regulate demand and supply domestically. This does not, however, mean the new rulers of Afghanistan have taken their eyes off European markets. On the contrary, the long-term objective seems to be moving toward centralization of the narcotics industry in government hands and ultimately the maximization of revenues from that industry in state coffers.
(...)
“The Taliban have counted on the Afghan opium trade as one of their main sources of income,” César Guedes, head of UNODC’s Kabul office, told Reuters last year. Nor are Taliban officials any longer hindered by the political considerations that motivated U.S.-led counternarcotics policies. These policies were to a large degree pursued to shield allied European nations from relentless flows of narcotics and the consequent organized crime. The Taliban now pledge to patrol and protect their borders to prevent the drug trade, but in reality they intentionally overlook to smuggling activities.

https://archive.ph/COYIn


And then a couple of days later, BIG headlines that the Taliban BAN heroin production: https://www.voanews.com/a/taliban-ban-op...13193.html


The following documentary includes an interview with Terry Reed (starting at 0:58:00), an earlier posted video with Reed was deleted for some reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-xtMjkul0c