If we’re so keen in the West to stop heroin coming in, then a short-run, put-up-or-shut-up solution would be for us to buy the raw poppy crop and destroy it. No messing round with crop substitution subsidies and the like. Just get the wallets out and buy it in a properly regulated market. Now, in the longer run that would create incentives for them to grow more, but it would also perhaps test our resolve on the ‘war on drugs issue’. If it really is a moral crusade, we’d be able to put a direct value on how much that crusade is costing. People could then make up their minds whether such a crusade is value for tax money or not.
As you say, Phil, there is zero moral case for us to sit in Whitehall or Washington and tell Afghan farmers what they can and cannot grow. It’s even worse in the case of Bolivia, where the US has tried to stop Bolivians growing coca leaves for their own consumption. Shrill complainants about too many American films at the multiplex often band the phrase ‘cultural imperialism’ about. That’s bollocks. But requiring farmers on the other side of the world to have a ‘permission slip’ for their crop choices certainly is.
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