The following is a further clarification on the Issue Of The Week posted yesterday. Generally, the Issue of The Week is not related to the same issue as the previous week. However, given that Afghanistan is the grower of poppy for almost all heroin on the planet, is central to the war on terror, that the Taliban has used profits from selling heroin to fund its Islamic fundamentalist terrorist war, that Afghan peasants depend on this for subsistence, and that changing this under current war and economic conditions appears improbable and counterproductive, the issue seems worth revisiting in light of the vote on last week’s Issue Of The Week and a subsequent New York Times report. The vote on last week’s Issue Of The Week was 54% to 46% in favor of efforts to eradicate the poppy crop, even if it was environmentally harmful, would hurt other food crops, and would be a propaganda tool for the Taliban with poor peasants, who otherwise may oppose them, but would be vulnerable to propaganda in view of harm to their livelihood, The New York Times reported Sunday that 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 to be used for the 6.2 million poor dying without adequate pain relief, estimated by the World Heath Organization. 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.” Experts and farmers from other countries with large populations of poor farmers such as India are also concerned about paying Afghani farmers in a poppy for morphine program exclusive of other nation’s farmers, as they believe it to be unfair to not have their own farmers produce for such needs in their own countries. And although Afghanistan currently has nearly a monopoly on poppy production for heroin, if it was somehow eradicated there, as long as the lucrative heroin market exists, the growth of poppies will thrive somewhere. Do you support the United States and other affluent nations, perhaps through a fund organized by the World Health Organization, buying poppy crops from farmers in Afghanistan to provide medical relief to millions of dying poor around the world, in order to also assist in winning the war on terror against the Taliban and its ally Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, with the caveats of developing an alternative plan in the long run to further diversify the farming economy in Afghanistan, and global efforts to be address economic opportunity and fairness to poor peasants in other nations given the inevitability of demand for poppy in the devastating and often murderous heroin trade and addiction worldwide, and the alternative need for morphine to help the millions of poor who cannot afford it?