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While we're losing a war by trying to eradicate opium poppies in Afghanistan, it's worth looking at how eradication efforts are going in another lawless mountain wilderness:
According to officials at the Office of National Drug Policy's Appalachia High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Program (HIDTA), Kentucky produces more marijuana than any other state except California, making it home to one of the nation's more intensive eradication efforts -- a yearly game of harvest-time cat and mouse in national forests, abandoned farms, shady hollows, backyards and mountainsides.Drug eradication teams are about as popular in Eastern Kentucky as they are in Afghanistan's Opium Belt:
Many of the small towns of Eastern Kentucky, steeped in a tradition of bootlegging moonshine, also have high rates of unemployment and poverty and in some cases, public corruption, according to federal drug officials. People can make as much as $2,000 from a single plant, an often irresistible draw when good-paying jobs are scarce. Much of what is harvested is carried in car trunks to such cities as Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Detroit, authorities say. The estimated worth of seized plants alone far outstrips Kentucky's other crops. Federal statistics from the Department of Agriculture for 2005 show state receipts for tobacco were $342 million and corn was $336 million, compared with close to $1 billion of pot eradicated last year by HIDTA.Over time, growing pot has become an "accepted and even encouraged" part of the culture in Appalachia, according to a 2006 report from the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Still, authorities complain that in some counties it is difficult to get a jury to indict, much less convict, a marijuana grower.And the campaign has been just about as successful:
Efforts in all 50 states haven't kept marijuana production from increasing tenfold in the past 25 years to 22 million pounds in 2006, according to federal estimates compiled by a researcher from St. Pierre's organization, using statistics from the U.S. Justice Department and other agencies.The best that can be said for eradication efforts in Kentucky is that they are simply a waste of time and money. In Afghanistan, the situation is much worse. --Robert Farley
