The Taliban’s Opium Ban Has Become an Existential Problem for the West – By Max Daly (Vice) / Aug 30, 2023
As fears grow Afghanistan’s opium trade is the only barrier to a global opioid death epidemic, experts tell VICE News “there are no good options.”
For two decades the West has seen Afghanistan’s vast opium production and trafficking industry as an enemy: a malicious trade that has supplied most of the world’s heroin, creating addiction and gangsterism, and turned Afghanistan into a corrupt narco-state. But now, as Taliban leaders ask for help in eliminating the vast opium economy, the West is realising that doing so could take it into far worse territory – and spark a global opioid death crisis.
How to respond to the Taliban’s opium ban is a multi-dimensional policy dilemma with many potential outcomes, and most of them are a different flavour of bad. A continued ban supported by the West could trigger civil war and a humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan, another migration calamity, and a fresh wave of fatal drug overdoses that would dwarf the death toll in North America. Angle for an end to the ban and the world’s biggest heroin industry whirls back into action again, and it’s business as usual.
The West is in two minds. The UN warns of “severe and far-reaching” consequences of a heroin shortage, while providing millions of dollars in alternative livelihood funding to wean Afghan farmers off growing the plants that produce it.
Behind closed doors, governments fear a shortage of the crop could prompt international traffickers to pump deadly fentanyl into the world’s heroin supplies. There are whispers the Taliban could be using the ban as a political stunt, or even colluding with drug gangs to raise the price of opium.
