History of opium

According to tradition opium was introduced to Afghanistan by Alexander the Great and has been grown for over two millennia. Appreciated for its analgesic and other medical properties, opium has been used as a remedy for a myriad of conditions including diarrhea, dysentery and fever. Islamic physicians advocated the medical use of opium including the celebrated AbuAli al-Husayn ibn Sida (Avicenna), who described it as the most powerful of the stupefacients or sleep inducing substances. In Afghanistan opium has been prescribed for centuries by traditional healers known as hakim, was traded openly in the bazaars and is still the remedy of choice in rural areas. Different cultures of consumption prevail in different parts of the country, it can be eaten, often in little pills known as madak.

Grown amidst other crops in the complex systems of intercropping that characterised Afghani agriculture, opium was raised for domestic use and sale up. Against a background of inter tribal warfare and long periods of uncertainty, households and villages were striving for self sufficiency first. Only when market conditions were right, did farmers exert their efforts to produce a surplus for sale. Opium, as all agricultural production, was therefore modest, for mainly domestic demand.

In 1905 it was reported that opium poppy was one of the main crops planted in autumn and harvested in spring in the Nangarhar province, and that opium was produced all over the country, “but not to any great extent”. It seems that production and control were in the hands of a few great families related to the King. The earliest estimate from 1932 suggests that Afghanistan was producing some 75 tons of opium, mainly for the domestic and Iranian markets. In line with rising population growth and demand from neighbouring countries, production kept rising. When the governments of both Iran and Pakistan prohibited production in 1979 without curtailing demand, Afghani farmers met the shortfall by stepping up production to some 250 tons by 1982. By then, however, the country had been invaded by the Soviet Union and many of its institutions and structures were shaken to their foundations. As Afghani resistance intensified the Soviets applied scorched earth tactics, destroying the market economy across most of the country, and driving rural areas back into a subsistence economy.

Throughout the war of liberation and the subsequent civil war, military commanders depended on opium earnings to buy their weapons and pay their fighters. Upon coming to power in 1995, the Islamist Taliban regime was concerned first of all with suppressing the use of hashish, which enjoyed wide popularity in the country (and was sometimes mixed with crushed scorpion tails). In response to reports of rising opiate use, and induced by promises of financial support from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Mullah Omar, the head of the regime, issued a ban on opium cultivation in 2001 which was brutally enforced. Production plummeted from 3,276 tons in 2000 to 185 in 2001. In the end this proved unsustainable, as many farmers were ruined by the loss of income incurring debt which could only be repaid by planting more opium in 2002. After the US led invasion, production has shot back up spreading to a record 193,000 hectares in 2007. Today opium is cultivated all over the country, but concentrated in the four southern provinces of Kandahar, Uruzgan, Daikundi and Zabul.

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