Before being overthrown by the US invasion in 2001, the Taliban had been praised by the UN for having largely eradicated the cultivation of opium poppies in the country. Opium poppy, raw opium is extracted from it and heroin is extracted from it. The Taliban banned poppy cultivation in 2000 while seeking international legitimacy. In the areas controlled by the radical Islamists, the cultivation of pink flowers fell by 99 percent, according to UN data. That corresponded to about three quarters of the world supply of heroin at the time, which disappeared from the world market.
After the US invasion, poppy cultivation soared again in Afghanistan. With the result that the “liberated” Afghanistan inundated the USA and also the British, who had followed the Americans on foot, with cheap Afghan heroin since the invasion.
The devastating consequences of this can be seen all too well in America today: According to the, the United States died in 2019 alone state institute on substance abuse more than 50,000 addicts from an opioid overdose. The pharmaceutical companies Purdue and Johnson & Johnson are also making a lot of money: They are responsible for countless lawsuits in the USA for illegally marketing addictive opiate painkillers.
US invasion makes Afghanistan the first real drug state in the world
But a lot of heroin from Afghanistan is also flooding the American drug market. A fact that cannot be found in the official US government figures. The fact that the Afghanistan invasion indirectly led to the largest drug epidemic in US history.
The then British Prime Minister Tony Blair (68) had used Afghan heroin as an argument in favor of invading Afghanistan and overthrowing the Taliban. Afghanistan and its heroin, Blair said, were to blame for the deaths of countless young people in the West. Regardless of the fact that the same Taliban tried to put a stop to the glut of heroin from their country.
The western invasion of the Hindu Kush resulted in Afghanistan becoming the world’s first true drug state. In the early years, the Americans were still trying to eradicate poppy fields, but they only aroused the anger of farmers, villages, and even entire stretches of land. Poppy, that meant good money. And the poppy fields, which soon bloomed again in many areas, oiled the war machine of the Taliban guerrillas.
Equipment of war thanks to poppy seeds
“The Taliban have relied on the Afghan opium trade as one of their main sources of income,” says Cesar Gudes, head of the Kabul office of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). According to estimates by the UN authorities, more than 80 percent of the world’s opium and heroin now come from Afghanistan. Practically under the protection of the United States, the Taliban were able to grow into the most drug-funded, non-terrorist organization in the world.
Drugs are Afghanistan’s “largest industry apart from war,” says Barnett Rubin, a former Afghanistan advisor to the US State Department. The record year 2017 with 9,900 tons of opium brought 1.4 billion dollars into the coffers of Afghan farmers. According to the UN, the Taliban are involved in every step of the drug trade – in poppy cultivation, in opium production, in trade, in levying taxes on growers and drug laboratories, right up to collecting smugglers’ fees for deliveries to Africa, Europe, Canada, Russia, in the United States Middle East and other parts of Asia.
There are no reliable figures on how many millions the Taliban earn every year thanks to the inconspicuous pink poppy. Enough not to let the most modern and strongest army in the world defeat you for 20 years.