Anne Applebaum has some good policy advice for the fanatical drug warriors in the administration.

This is yet one more reason to wish that we'd had better choices in the last couple elections.

But the anonymous morons in my comments section will continue to call me a "republican stooge."

The taliban are fanatically anti-opium.
It was the drug lords of the northern alliance
who are in favor of opium production.

It's the most familiar fig leaf from self-perceived libertarians. Even if they clearly trust Republicans 100 times more than they trust Democrats, they then say, "I'm not a Republican stooge, because I'm against the war on drugs." Typically this fig leaf is offered is the most radical terms possible, as a sly signal that it has no bearing on any serious national dispute. Or it's used to wave away a liberal concern or a Republican failing. In this case, that failing is the fact that the Bush Administration is losing the winnable war in Afghanistan.

The truth is that if opium were legal, Afghanistan wouldn't be competitive. In fact it is legal to grow opium for pain medicine, and Afghanistan isn't competitive at that sanctioned activity. Illegal opium or cocaine farming is entirely a symptom and a cause of lawlessness. On that score, Afghanistan sets a new standard: It grows more illegal opium by itself than the entire world demand.

Afghanistan is so broken down that it can only compete internationally at contraband. If it weren't opium, it could be child prostitution. Or maybe fresh organs extracted from unwilling donors. If no such options are available, the Afghans might well starve.

> The taliban are fanatically anti-opium.

Only when the drought of 2000-2001 wiped out the opium crop. Then they took credit for it to get more funding from the west. Cereal crops declined at the same time - for the same reason - and and increased again after the drought - for the same reason.

The taliban are once again using the opium trade to raise money.

Nice try though.

roger can you cite your source?

I'm curious what a "self-perceived" libertarian is. Since Buckleyite conservatives read people like me out of their movement (and I decided--after attending a conservative seminar in the early Seventies in which a panel of very prominent conservative writers all enthusiastically supported Nixon's wage and price controls--that I wasn't really at home in the conservative movement anyway), I've been perceiving myself as a libertarian. Now Roger raises the possibility that despite my total disavowal of the use of aggressive force, I may not be a real libertarian after all. Blows my mind, man/