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Opium in Afghanistan
Let's turn the microphone over to the very intelligent Jeffrey Clemens, who is now a Ph.d. student at Harvard I believe:
Recent estimates suggest that in 2007, Afghan opiate production accounted for about 93 percent of the world's total. This article presents a framework for estimating the potential for source country drug control policies to reduce this production. It contains a first pass at estimating the potential for policy to shift the supply of opium upward, as well as a range of supply and demand elasticities. The estimates suggest that meager reductions in production can be expected through alternative development programs alone (reductions are less than 6.5 percent in all but one of the specifications presented). They also suggest that substantial increases in crop eradication would be needed to achieve even moderate reductions in production (reductions range from 3.0 percent to 19.4 percent for various specifications). The results also imply that, all else being equal, the cessation of crop eradication would result in only modest increases in opiate production (with estimates ranging from 1.6 percent to 9.6 percent).
I can't find an ungated copy, can you? In any case, the bottom line seems to be that this problem won't get solved.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on October 8, 2009 at 12:11 PM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
my 2 censt worth, you need bold action for a problem of this scale
Posted by: Florist at Oct 8, 2009 12:16:48 PM
No, the last thing we need to solve this problem is bold action. We need, very simply, no drug policy. Just like we should have no trade policy and no marriage policy. I.E. free trade, legal drugs, etc.
Posted by: a person at Oct 8, 2009 12:32:21 PM
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/11/27/Afghan-opium-supply-outstrips-demand/UPI-46161227826687/
From November 2008:
"But prices have dropped about 20 percent because, after three years of good harvests, the supply of opium far exceeds global demand. Costa said that the price would have dropped even more if opium had not been kept off the market by the Taliban, drug lords and even some farmers."
Posted by: Bob at Oct 8, 2009 12:47:23 PM
If someone has to grow opium, it might as well be people who have the worst alternatives, so this can be seen as welfare maximizing for Afghanistan. Of course, some of the rents accrue to the Taliban, but that could be fixed by legalization.
Posted by: Thorfinn at Oct 8, 2009 1:39:53 PM
From the abstract, it seems that the problem can't be solved by a supply side policy, it would be good to have some similar estimates for demand-side policies. Also, to add to Bob's comment, it seems that(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/world/asia/01iht-drugs.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=myanmar%20opium&st=cse) some of Myanmar's rebels have a big opium production potential and that production there may increase in the next months because of the recent conflicts at the borders.
Posted by: PtitSeb at Oct 8, 2009 1:42:15 PM
There is no problem to solve.
Violating farmers rights to grow what they want is the problem.
Posted by: Geoffrey at Oct 8, 2009 1:47:04 PM
Yep, the problem will not get solved by conventional means.
Perhaps the government should purchase the opium at a premium to the Taliban.
Posted by: Bill at Oct 8, 2009 1:53:36 PM
The question one must ask is why have the Chicago Boys and so many other centers of economic thought failed so badly in educating politicians and policy makers who so often cite economists from these centers of thought in justifying their policies?
Why don't economists think the politicians are just using the words of economists to justify the political free lunches and political authoritarianism the politicians sought office to control?
I heard a comment to the effect "Milton Friedman is a hero to many..." yet those politicians most associated with Friedman as hero are those who most actively pursue the irrational "war on drugs" and "three strikes" and so on as if to slap Milton Friedman in the face, and to spit on his grave.
Posted by: mulp at Oct 8, 2009 2:25:52 PM
Jeff Clemens is very intelligent indeed. And yes, he is a PhD student at Harvard right now. Why is he not running Afghanistan? Because he prefers air conditioning to heroine.
Posted by: Stan at Oct 8, 2009 2:36:54 PM
Just let Pfizer or Merck or JNJ or P&G or any of the Brystol Myers produce the opium.
I can pretty much guarantee that the problems of drug funded taliban and opium production in Afghanistan will be over in about 2 weeks.
Posted by: Andrew at Oct 8, 2009 3:06:28 PM
Just let Pfizer or Merck or JNJ or P&G or any of the Brystol Myers produce the opium.
I think you mean to say let them sell and market opium as freely as they have sold cold medicines that are by and large the modern equivalents of the patent medicines that introduced Americans to the opiates and coca derivatives.
The Afghanis would certainly make a lot of money supplying these drug companies.
Posted by: mulp at Oct 8, 2009 3:13:16 PM
this is such a strawman arguement. Opium is made in Afghanistan. If we eliminate afghan opium, we eliminate drugs! Ooooooor, they just produce opium elsewhere. I mean, honestly, change opium and afghanistan to TVs and Japan and see if makes sense. This is such a spurrious line of thought.
I think, though, my #1 for anarchic narco-farming regions is still the Beka'a valley. Same hyper-libertarian dynamic but with tasty wine!
Posted by: farmer at Oct 8, 2009 3:18:42 PM
wonder what the production cost & avg yield comparison is to say india which has the US pharma market . whether itd be worth pharma getting involved or if sharecropping would be the death of them.
Posted by: wenchy at Oct 8, 2009 3:19:02 PM
A more interesting set of figures would be the projected impacts on Afghan opium production in a legal environment where narcotics were legal.
Posted by: Noah Yetter at Oct 8, 2009 3:22:13 PM
Can we solve the "problem" without collapsing Afghanistan's economy? Why not just legalize drugs? Or, at least, buy the drugs and then dump them in the ocean?
Posted by: Neal at Oct 8, 2009 3:57:44 PM
I can't spell heroin. That sucks.
Posted by: Stan at Oct 8, 2009 4:16:55 PM
Ungated copy is at his website -- http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~clemens/papers.html
And I apologize for misspelling "heroin" earlier.
Posted by: Stan at Oct 8, 2009 4:16:56 PM
What, exactly, is the problem?
Posted by: michael at Oct 8, 2009 4:22:31 PM
The Afghan government should purchase the heroin from the Afghan farmer and pay him partly in Afghan government bonds, making the farmer have some stake in the continuation of the government. The US could support the Afghan bonds.
Posted by: Bill at Oct 8, 2009 4:43:03 PM
I've heard the argument that America should just buy the opium and destroy it. This is stupid, a much better idea would be to pay them enough for potatoes that it is more lucrative to grow potatoes (or rice or whatever else useful can grow there). Or just do what we do domestically, pay the farmers not to grow anything. Why don't we shift all our farm subsidies to Afghanistan?
Posted by: Ignacious Plunder at Oct 8, 2009 5:20:59 PM
A debate that never ends:
"Thursday, October 9, 2008
Some Proposals Make Too Much Sense
Also from Nick Gillespie on Reason, a great idea from Hitchens:
"Over at Slate, Christopher Hitchens proposes a novel solution to the "problem" of Afghan farmers continued interest in growing opium poppies, their biggest cash crop: The U.S. should buy the crop rather than letting the Taliban do so.
We don't have to smoke the stuff once we have purchased it: It can be burned or thrown away or perhaps more profitably used to manufacture the painkillers of which the United States currently suffers a shortage. (As it is, we allow Turkey to cultivate opium poppy fields for precisely this purpose.) ...
Read the rest. Too reasonable to go anywhere, of course. "
Since I suffer from kidney stones and migraines, I say that we manufacture painkillers.
Posted by: Don the libertarian Democrat at Oct 8, 2009 7:23:26 PM
This is the same question I have wondered about in relation to Laos, one of Asia's poorest countries, and one where opium is a traditional crop. Why is it illegal for the Lao, or the Pashtun, or the Hmong, to grow opium, when Tasmanians produce it in great bulk as a cash crop?
Is this another example of the world's poorest people only having the rights that they're given? Who decided that white Tasmanians may grow opium, and Muslim highlanders and animist swidden-farmers may not? And where is the PO Box where these groups can apply to join the opium-growing club?
Posted by: simon at Oct 8, 2009 8:15:10 PM
Last I heard, Afghan opium producers get c. $4 billion USD annually for their crop, which is some fraction of what the US and NATO are spending on operations there. In concord with Mr. Hitchens's views, let the US and/or the UK and/or whatever NATO member states care to participate, purchase each year's crop outright (we can deal with Burmese, Laotian, Tasmanian production similarly, perhaps); each year's (Afghan) production could be readily airlifted to Guam or some other remote outpost for incineration, if that's what is wished, or it may be released for sale to keep the Portuguese happy (is heroin in fact a part of their current drug policy?).
And just remember: without opium, we would never have had the Rolling Stones we've come to love and admire.
Posted by: Edward Burke at Oct 8, 2009 9:28:02 PM
Why incinerate it? Opium's a useful crop, why is there this emphasis on destroying it? Suppose the Taliban were being funded by potato farmers, would we buy the potato crop and burn it? My question is why Australians have the right to produce opium, but the Pashtun don't.
Posted by: simon at Oct 8, 2009 9:58:53 PM
And perhaps, since the Pashtun support the Taliban, rather than opium supporting the Taliban, isn't it likely that whatever crop they grow to survive will have the same effect? Maybe the problem isn't opium, but the fact that the Pashtun support the Taliban, and perhaps focusing on opium is a way to avoid confronting that fact. Suppose they all grew potatoes and exported them to Tajikistan and used the profits to fund an insurgency -- would we talk about how an explosion in potato cultivation was fueling anti-American activities?
Since the Pashtun have to live, and they seem to support the Taliban, what's the anti-insurgency point of shifting them from one crop to another? They still support the Taliban.
Posted by: simon at Oct 8, 2009 10:03:33 PM
