"Why don't we just buy the crop...?" Yeah, especially with this worldwide shortage of medical opiates I've been hearing about this past year. A May 2007 article "Why 'legalising' Afghan opium for medicine is a non-starter" suggests some obstacles. ("For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." H. L. Mencken, 1880-1956)

If we actually want to deal with these drug problems, I imagine reducing the addict market by valuing youths and other people in precarious circumstances in our neighbourhoods, as important parts of their communities, would be at least as useful as bombing some poor blighters on another continent. I doubt Afghani farmers have much choice what to grow or to whom to deliver it, anyway. If they do try to change things there, it could look dangerously like a threat to the drug operations already using the region as their supply base. More long-term results with less risk to the people when we train judges and send food home with schoolgirls for their families.

To resist corruption we have to act together. For instance, recently international narcotics traffickers seem to have started using Guinea-Bissau as a trans-Atlantic shipping station. Who's got more money: the government of a small and war-scarred West African country, or international drug lords? Can the police, judges, and politicians of that country stop the invasion? Not without substantial help from outside. (European nations whose addicts' money these traffickers are using, would have the most to gain by providing the UN with the resources to help Guinea-Bissau reverse the spate of threats, bribery, corruption, and violence with which the drug trade is trying to grab control of the country. Europe and Africa will both lose big if South American cocaine can land there by the planeload with impunity.)