To follow up on the BBC story I posted below about the ‘Prince of Death’, an obit to the world’s #1 heroin dealer, Afghanistan’s 2007 record harvest of poppies is 93 per cent of the world’s opium, according to the UN Office On Drugs and Crime.
The Tyee reports, “A token amount of Afghanistan’s harvest is confiscated (no high level trafficker has yet been caught) and a fraction stays in the country to supply a relatively small but growing number of addicts. The rest feeds heroin habits around the world, destroying millions of lives and enriching others with drug money.”
Yes heroin destroys, but it’s not entirely true that Afghanistan’s opium paste is converted to heroin. It seems “by far the bulk of Afghani poppy sap has always been shipped to Pakistan where the primary products have been Codeine and its kin, and NOT Heroin.
Pakistan has long been the primary world supplier of medicinal Codeine, and among the major consumers have been Third World countries, who have depended upon Codeine as a cheap analgesic.”