'cause it worked so well the first time ...

The U.S. empire government has significant experience in spraying poison on other peoples' lands; sometimes, ostensibly, to fight the war on drugs. In Colombia they've targeted coca, using souped-up Roundup (in a combination of ingredients including a surfactant known as Cosmo-Flux 411 used to help it stick to and penetrate plants), spelling a deliberate disaster harmful to the environment and its people. The Washington Office on Latin America released a report six months ago confirming that aerial fumigation sucks. Chew on this:

• An Organization of American States agency produced a report in March 2005 that absolved aerial spraying in Colombia of significant harm to humans or the environment (no small feat: Colombian biodiversity has been among the highest in the world - second most diverse country in terms of species/area). Touted heavily ever since by drug war zealots, the report has been widely criticized for not considering important environmental effects (i.e., deforestation: fumigating coca crops in one area leads to campesinos clearing more land and planting more coca elsewhere), focusing more heavily on less significant problems (effects on land animals) than on issues that are more pressing (destruction of licit crops; soil erosion) and most significantly, I think, an inadequate basis in field research.
• Later that year, a French research team found glyphosate and Roundup toxic to human placental cells, at levels below typical agricultural dilutions: so fumigations impact human reproductive systems, too.
• A picture taken by IPS Drug Policy Project Director Sanho Tree depicts a woman's arm displaying a rash typical of those caused by direct fumigations.

Aerial spraying doesn't even work - there's as much coca paste coming out of Colombia now as there was when the fumigations started eight years ago; the price, purity, and availability of cocaine on U.S. streets has remain unchanged.

So in Afghanistan, should we really look to the crops themselves as the "root of the narcotics problem" (as Thomas Schweich, former state department counter-narcotics bigwig, wrote in his disgustingly imperialist July 27th article in the New York Times)? It sure is easier than looking at where and why - or by whom - this problem was created in the first place.

Cristina Oguz doesn't think we should "blame Afghanistan alone for the heroin problem in the world." She's the country rep for UN Office on Drugs and Crime, and was recently quoted in an AP story: "It's true that this country is producing the raw material for heroin, the opium. But it is not possible to make heroin without certain chemicals, and these chemicals are not produced inside Afghanistan."

Norine MacDonald, Founder, President and Lead Field Researcher of international security/development think tank Senlis Council, agrees. She responded to Schweich's NYT article with a pointed critique of his favored approach to aerial eradication. Acknowledging the health and environmental harms that would stem from fumigations, and also noting that this practice would drive further support for the Taliban-led resistance, MacDonald advocated the Poppy for Medicine scheme Senlis developed. While her letter states "we can use market forces to successfully combat Afghanistan's illegal drug trade," and I would argue strongly against not only the framing, tone, and assumptions involved but even the conclusion itself, Poppy for Medicine is a world away from spraying Afghan farmers, their licit and illicit crops, and the Afghan countryside. I would much rather someone like MacDonald be at the helm of international policy in Afghanistan than Schweich, however much I disagree with her politics. His article and position betrays - along with what is either willful or pretended ignorance of Colombian and even Afghan realities - the sickening (yet unsurprising) racist, colonial perspective that consistently characterizes U.S. state department and drug policy, be it domestic or international.

As we work to end the war on drugs in our communities in the United States, let us not forget the consequences abroad. Military responses - including the use of chemical weaponry - don't work at home, don't work abroad, and they're morally wrong, in every possible sense.

Labels: Afghanistan, fumigations