WITH the withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam and rising awareness of CIA drug involvement in Central and South America, the Americans shifted their attention to Central Asia.
Opium had been grown and used as an effective analgesic (pain-killer) and treatment for insomnia in places like Afghanistan for a long time. When Napoleon’s troops found out about this plant which was traditionally chewed, they began to use it when they were fighting against other European nations over that region.
The British soon after got their hands on opium and with it they almost destroyed a generation of Chinese people and colonised parts of China after two all-out Opium Wars. The Chinese were fighting to outlaw the dangerous narcotic. The effects of the drug worsened because the Chinese smoked the opium instead of chewing it.
When the US, along with other NATO member-nations, entered Afghanistan, opium production and trade increased to unprecedented levels. US propaganda, which is spread by powerful media outlets like BBC, CNN, FOX news and so on, claims that the Taliban use opium to intimidate the population. And that US is in that land to protect the Afghan people from the group they call terrorists, yet the members of the Taliban are freedom fighters in their own land.
Though Afghan poppy or opium is indigenous to that land, the US does not make clear its intentions to control the production and trade of opium, which they process into drugs such as heroin, methadone, morphine, codeine and so on. These narcotics are called opiates and are sold by the US to the international community from Afghanistan.
While the US hides its intentions, evidence of their actions is clear. The US first entered Afghanistan militarily in the early 1990, when the Soviet Union which had invaded Afghanistan prior to them was withdrawing.
In 1990, Afghanistan was producing about 2 000 tonnes of opium annually. By 2002, Afghanistan was producing over 3 700 tonnes a year, almost double their initial output a decade earlier. US forces had increased in the region because of the 2001 attacks of the US Twin Towers. Within four years, by 2006, the production of opium had again quadrupled to 7 000 tonnes annually.
In terms of area, between 1994 and 2000, the average cultivation area of opium in Afghanistan was 60 000 hectares and not over 90 000 hectares. In 2001, opium cultivation in Afghanistan dropped to 8 000 hectares.
With the coming of US and NATO forces to Afghanistan in response to the 9/11 incident, by 2002, opium was being planted on 74 000 hectares of Afghan land. By 2007, the production of opium had taken up 193 000 hectares of Afghan land.
In June of 2007, the World Drug Report said: “90 percent of illegal opium which is used to make heroin comes from Afghanistan.” The report also highlighted there were over 30 000 US troops in Afghanistan that year, including international troops from NATO member-countries.
In March 2010, NATO members rejected Russia’s call to destroy Afghan poppy by way of spraying. The UN and also Russia’s federal drug control agency warned the world that: “Poppy production had jumped 40 times since the US’s intervention in Afghanistan. By 2008, Afghanistan was growing 7 500 tonnes of opium annually on 193 000 hectares of Afghan land.
Once harvested, this opium is processed into hard drugs like heroin and morphine through the use of imported chemicals. 92 percent of the opium plantations and labs of Afghanistan are located in zones controlled by NATO troops.
The US troops guard the opium farmers, provide them with inputs like fertiliser, quell any resistance from local groups like the Taliban and pack the opium and transport it to the labs for processing. When the US soldiers are questioned as to why they operate in opium fields in the country, they respond saying that they tolerate opium cultivation because the population would turn against the US marines if they fight it. They also say it is part of Afghan culture and accuse the Taliban of holding the Afghan people hostage by punishing them if they don’t grow opium.
This is all US propaganda; lies orchestrated to continue the deadly trade of opiates around the world. Opium sap is what was eaten and smoked by the Afghan and Chinese people respectively.
To understand the negative effects of opium use, we will have to go back in time and identify the past victims of opium use. Following a ban on alcohol in over 12 US states in the mid-1800, an opiate called morphine was made by a German called Fredrick Sertena in 1851.
Morphine was sold as a cure to alcoholism among many other things. Little did people know it was 10 times as effective as opium sap, and had deadlier effects than alcohol. This was until Fredrick’s wife died because of a morphine overdose, and though he warned the world against it, morphine became a common household drug which was sold in patent medicines that did not display ingredients.
Morphine is effectively the most addictive and deadly drug on earth today. It is behind the worst epidemic of drug abuse in the West. Morphine was also used during surgery because as an opiate, it had sedative (sleep-inducing) and analgesic (pain-killing) effects, but at a high price of addiction and death, though at this time people were ignorant of the end results of using opium.
The surgeons of that time were seeking ways to make the effects of morphine more direct because if eaten or smoked, the effects took longer to feel. Thus the hypodermic syringe and needle was invented in order to administer the morphine straight into the bloodstream. From the blood the morphine shot would go to the heart where it would be pumped to every part of the body, particularly the brain where the psychoactive effects of the drug take place.
When the effects of opium and morphine were evident, after 50 years of unrestrained use, there were millions of addicts in the US, among them judges, teachers, leaders, doctors and physicians. However, the biggest victims of the patent medicines that at time contained up to 50 percent morphine were white women from rural backgrounds and their children. Morphine had been used to treat menstruation cramps and sooth crying babies. The users would birth under-nourished babies, some in a semi-comatose state as well as children with continued poor health.
In 1898, yet another German scientist produced another opiate called heroin which he sold as a cough remedy since at that time, cough-related illnesses like pneumonia and tuberculosis were the top killer diseases. Heroin was used as a substitute to morphine and was used to treat morphine addiction, little did they know that heroin turns into morphine once it metabolises in the liver.
Heroin was packaged in stores or mailed in cases containing a hypodermic syringe and two needles. After a boom in promotion and sales, it was unfortunately found out that heroine was altogether more deadly than its predecessors.
The overdose of opium, morphine and heroin lead to death by way of shutting down the brain, lungs and heart because opiates enter the central nervous system of the brain and can disrupt such vital functions of the human body. Once in the brain’s neuro-centres, opiates of whatever strain can interfere with the digestive system, body temperature and breathing system.