Our New Plan Colombia

I'm catching up on a huge backlog of drug war news tonight. Here's the latest from Afghanistan (well, the latest I've gotten up to):

THE Afghan government has ruled out licensing its country's poppy crops and allowing Britain and the US to buy the harvest for conversion into legitimate medical painkillers such as morphine, The Herald can reveal.

The Foreign Office admitted yesterday moves to curb cultivation of the opium poppies by legalising and controlling the raw narcotic product had been vetoed by President Hamd Karzai.

The opium paste collected by farmers refines down into 90% of the heroin sold on Britain's streets and is worth more than £1.5bn a year to growers and traffickers.

UN sources claim Kabul's reluctance to legalise the opium stems more from the fact that a number of senior politicians backed by the West are key players in the trade or receive regular payments from traffickers to turn a blind eye.

[emphasis mine]

And considering what happened to Haji Bashar Noorzai, I can't imagine why any of those politicians would have any interest in making deals with the United States anyway.