U.N.: Iraq Emerging As Drug Trafficker

U.N.: Iraq Emerging As Drug Trafficker - Yahoo! News

For your consideration, a thought: Under the Taliban, opium poppy cultivation was outlawed and production fell from 4,042 tons per year to a little over 80 tons per year. Within a year of the October, 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan, opium poppy production had grown to 3,400 tons per year. By 2004, it had reached 4,200 tons.

Despite a twenty year, US funded "war on drugs," Colombia (one of the few remaining US allies in Latin America) remains one of the biggest producers of cocaine and traffickers of heroin in the world. Some think the drug war is a facade, a reason to aid the right-wing Colombian government in its on-going guerilla war against the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a communist group who have been blamed for the drug trafficking), because "the notion of a war against drug production is eminently more marketable to U.S. politicians and voters than a post-Cold War crusade against South American Communist guerrillas."

Now, the "liberation" of Iraq has brought about the rise of a significant drug trade, according to Hamid Ghodse, the president of the International Narcotics Control Board.

Does anyone else here see a suspicious pattern emerging, or is it just me?

Things are getting better now that Saddam is gone, right Howie?