The War on (some) Drugs, that is. In the real war. In Afghanistan:

We are winning in Afghanistan - that is the clear view on the ground. In contrast to Iraq, the Taliban are heavily on the back foot. Continued success, however, will be hampered by attempts to eradicate opium poppies...We are winning precisely because we are fighting the Taliban with "hearts and minds", not just militarily might. Success hinges on not driving the locals into supporting the enemy. Yet this is precisely what poppy eradication is starting to do. Farmers grow poppies in Helmand for the same reason farmers decide what to grow the world over - because it is the rational thing to do. It is not part of a cunning scheme to flood the infidel West with cheap heroin. To a Pashtun farmer, poppies mean an instant cash-crop. Advocates of poppy eradication like to argue that narcotics fuel the insurgency. The truth is the precise opposite. Farmers carry a financial risk when they grow poppies having already been paid for their unharvested crop. Destroying their crop will make it impossible to pay their debts. As a direct consequence, they then become much more likely to accept work as hired-guns for the Taliban. Fear of poppy eradication is mobilising local farmers to side with the Taliban. In the poppy growing Sanjin valley, the locals have teamed up with the Taliban and so that is now where our troops face the fiercest fighting. As Americans say, "Go figure".

Well, that's merely wage competition. Perhaps we could solve this quite simply by increasing the salary of their army and police force.

The simple solution is for us via the Afgan govt. to purchase the harvest. In the appropriate words of Barney Fife, "Nip it in the bud!"
Meanwhile start looking for a replacement crop.

This leaves out another important point. The Taliban was punishing the poppy growers by killing them. They are dead set against drugs and alcohol. They want everybody high on Allah. What we have in Afghanistan is simply a return of their traditional agriculture here. It's a tradition of only a few hundred years, but it's still tradition.

Stewart,
I'm not sure what crop will replace the opium trade either. Even at that level it's the most profitable crop they have. If it wasn't the most profitable, they'd be growing something else. Corn or potatoes.

It's profitable there because it's illegal here.

Traffik must be the best dramatic treatment of the problem.

Out of curiosity, is opium from Afghanistan really making it into the U.S.? I'd think most of what comes here comes from growers in south and central America.

I agree that the "drug war" as it has been conducted has not been a good thing.

What's the solution? As I've said before, I don't want my children doing drugs if I can help it at all.

Maybe we should legalize drugs, but have it so the national government has a monopoly on the drug trade. That way, we kill the profit for the drug dealers and growers and remove the impetus for all that crime. But since the government is in charge, we get a big, bloated, inefficient bureaucracy, so getting your drugs is such a pain that most people don't do it.

The problem with a government monopoly is that if it restricts supply, that keeps the price up and maintains incentives for Afghans, Columbians et al to keep supplying the stuff. And if our govt doesn't restrict supply, what's the point of having a monopoly? I think the least-bad approach is legalization combined with a change in cultural values to emphasize personal responsibility and discourage drug use. But changing values is hard and there is no organized interest group to lobby for it.