As opium harvests in Afghanistan have steadily increased, some think tanks and politicians have raised the question of whether governments should try to buy the harvest and convert the crop to morphine instead of continuing eradication efforts. Most prominent among these proposals is an analysis by the Senlis Council, a drug-policy research group with offices in London, Brussels and Kabul. The council argues that the United States and Britain waste more than $800 million a year, as well as soldiers’ lives, trying futilely to eradicate poppies. Instead, it calculated two years ago, Afghanistan’s whole crop could be purchased for about $600 million — the “farm gate” price, not the street value of the heroin into which it is refined, which is over $50 billion. Whatever the price, “enforcement will not work,” said Romesh Bhattacharji, a former narcotics commissioner of India who has investigated the Afghan situation for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. “The Afghan farmer will not switch to alternative crops as long as there is a market for his opium.” The United States and British governments are vigorously opposed; instead they favor tough eradication tactics and more encouragement to farmers to grow wheat, cotton or fruit. “They’re growing a poison, sir — one that kills Afghanistan’s neighbors and corrupts officials,” Thomas A. Schweich, chief of the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, said in a telephone interview. “There needs to be better and more forceful eradication.”

Donald G. McNeil, Jr.
Do you feel Western governments should consider the idea of purchasing Afghanistan's poppy crop in order to turn it into morphine as opposed to continuing eradication efforts on the ground?