This Week in Afghanistan Watch:

• Afghans to consider legalizing opium production
• "Marked increase" in women's registration for September polls
• Attack on security forces in Nurestan kills eight; election worker assassinated in Helmand
• Featured Article: Crime and Politics of the Opium Trade
  

August 4, 2005

"Because of its present situation, Afghanistan could play an important role in the production of essential medicines for the world.'' - The Senlis Council

Afghans to consider legalizing opium production
July 25 (Financial Times) by Andrew Jack—Afghan farmers could from next year be able to grow opium for legal medicinal purposes, under an innovative plan designed to curb illegal production being drawn up by a drug policy think-tank.

The Senlis Council, a group that studies narcotics, is in preliminary talks with international organisations and Afghan regional administrations to garner their support for pilot programmes designed to tackle the country's problem with opium by using it to produce the legal painkillers codeine and morphine.

The council, due to present in September a feasibility study funded by a dozen European social policy foundations, calculates that Afghan farmers and intermediaries could receive revenues from the scheme that almost match their current earnings from unauthorised opium production for smuggling abroad. The plan could help bring greater stability to Afghanistan and reduce illegal flows of opium to the rest of the world.

It could also help fill developing nations' large demand for painkillers. The group calculates this demand could be for twice the amount of Afghanistan's annual opium harvest.

"This may be the only chance Afghanistan has to solve its drug problem," said Emmanuel Reinert, co-ordinator of the study for the Senlis Council, who emphasised that discussions were at an early stage.

He hoped agreement for pilot projects could be reached later this year. "We think there are some good possibilities for shifting the debate," Mr Reinert said.

He said the plan had met cautious interest from officials including Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, although some members of the Afghan cabinet and foreign governments had expressed concern it could undermine current efforts to eradicate domestic opium production.

However, he argued neither eradication nor alternative employment programmes provided a realistic short-term alternative for Afghan farmers of opium, which accounts for an estimated 60 per cent of the country's gross domestic product and 80 per cent of the world's illegally consumed heroin.

The Senlis plan is modelled on programmes in India and Turkey, which have helped reduce illegal opium production through a strictly supervised licensing scheme backed by the US Congress. Congress requires 80 per cent of painkillers for the US market to use materials originating from these two countries. Mr Reinert said Turkey may be supportive because Afghan drug smuggling threatens its security, while India may resist new suppliers of painkillers.

"Marked Increase" in Registration Among Women for September Poll
KABUL, Aug 3 (IRIN)—With less than seven weeks to September's historic parliamentary elections, women have shown greater interest in participating, the Afghan-UN joint electoral management body (JEMB) announced on Wednesday in the capital Kabul. According to the electoral body, there had already been a marked increase in women's voter registration - particularly in the troubled south and southeastern provinces where no or very few women had registered during last October's presidential elections.

"It is very encouraging that in Afghanistan after so many years without elections, already women's participation is pretty high level," Rebecca Cox, a member of the JEMB, observed.

Kabul: Women stand in line for registration cards. © IRIN

In fact, women's registration was already quite close to 50 percent, the JEMB member explained, noting the progress to date. Of the over 12 million registered voters in Afghanistan today, more than 40 percent of the total were female.

Meanwhile, JEMB officials said voter registration by Afghan women increased by 35 percent in conservative southern Urozgan province and 23 percent in southern Helmand province.

"In the Ajristan district of Ghazni [southern province] no women registered last year; this year 13,000 women registered. In the Dasho district of Helmand province, only one woman registered last year; this year 1,361 women registered as eligible voters," Momena Yari, another member of the electoral body, explained…Yet despite JEMB's optimistic appraisal, female candidates hoping to stand in the forthcoming parliamentary elections maintain poor security and strong conservative traditions continue to hamper their ability to compete in the polls. In many rural areas, women voters cannot even attend public meetings, forcing female candidates to meet women inside their homes if they wish to campaign.

UN says Afghan election next month faces shortfall of 30 million dollars
KABUL, Aug 1 (AFP)—Afghanistan still faces a shortfall of more than 30 million dollars to fund landmark parliamentary and provincial elections scheduled for next month, the United Nations warned on Monday. "Our expectation is that the elections will go ahead as scheduled" on September 18, said Adrian Edwards, a spokesman for the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), but he stressed: "We need the money."

Gunmen kill nine in Afghanistan
Aug 3 (BBC)—Militants in Afghanistan have killed at least eight members of the security forces and an election worker weeks before landmark parliamentary polls.

About 50 gunmen attacked a checkpoint killing four soldiers and four police in the province of Nurestan on Tuesday night, the interior ministry said.

Gunmen on a motorcycle also shot dead a poll worker in a separate incident in the southern province of Helmand. He was the fifth election worker to die violently this year, officials say.

Featured Resource:

Correction: Last week we misattributed a report on "Afghanistan Elections: Endgame or New Beginning?". The report is in fact by the International Crisis Group and discusses the upcoming parliamentary elections:

• Afghanistan Elections: Endgame or New Beginning?
  In September 2005 Afghans will go to the polls to elect the National Assembly and Provincial Councils in a vote that will be crucial in consolidating Afghanistan's fragile political transition.

Featured Article:

The Senlis Council, a European drug policy group, is in the final stages of a feasibility study which suggests that Afghanistan could alleviate its drug crisis by adopting the Indian model: regulating and licensing opium for painkillers. While India and Turkey's programs have had remarkable success - they have alleviated chronic pain for millions, created economic opportunities for farmers, and have not led to widespread international smuggling - they are difficult to implement and not without problems. This week's article shows that India, despite being the world's largest producer of legal opium, still has trouble making affordable painkillers available to its citizens, and is facing internal smuggling. If licensing is adopted in Afghanistan, it must address these obstacles to ensure that opium reaches those who are dying for it and not those willing to kill for it.

Crime and Politics of the Opium Trade
KOLKATA, India, July 15 (Los Angeles Times) By Paul Watson—Cancer was slowly killing an old man in his fourth-floor apartment, and as the disease spread from organ to bone, sharp pains stabbed at his very core. A clear, oblong patch was stuck to Shyam Sundar Nevatia's chest, just above his weakening heart, gradually releasing a 25-milligram dose of opium-based narcotic over three days. The medication was no match for the relentless pain as death drew near.

Nevatia's doctor had prescribed more powerful morphine pills, but the 74-year-old businessman's family checked at hospitals and pharmacies, and even on the black market, without finding any.

India is the world's largest producer of legal opium, the raw material for codeine, morphine and other painkillers. But corruption and red tape have left thousands of Indians such as Nevatia to die in agony. And strict licensing hasn't stopped drug gangs from diverting opium meant for medicines to smuggling routes shared by heroin and morphine traffickers, gun-runners and Islamist militants, police say.

"Organized crime and politics join together in this to make life miserable,'' said A. Shankar Rao, zonal director of the Narcotics Control Bureau, a national police unit.

Mala Srivastava, the federal official who oversees the licensing system, denied that it had serious flaws. "Whatever little diversion there is is internal,'' she said. "We have never heard of Indian opium, or Indian heroin, traveling abroad.''

But the U.S. State Department's annual report on narcotics-control strategy calls India "a modest but growing producer of heroin for the international market.''

In an effort to keep opium out of criminal hands, India's federal and state governments license every step of the process, from growing poppies to stocking and transporting the painkilling drugs they produce. But officials who issue the permits often don't answer the phone, are away from their desks or let applications languish for weeks, doctors and pharmacists complain. Sometimes hospitals run out of morphine while waiting for permit applications to work their way through the bureaucratic labyrinth.

"We have so many patients suffering,'' said Dr. Dwarkadas K. Baheti, a pain-management specialist at Bombay Hospital, in India's largest city, Mumbai.

"After two or three months, suddenly we have no morphine left, and for the next month, none is available.''

The problems India faces have ramifications beyond the pain of its people. Afghanistan, which has the world's largest supply of illegal opium, is considering whether to license production for painkilling medicine, to channel opium away from the heroin market.

Experts with the Senlis Council, a French drug-policy advisory group, are conducting a feasibility study in Afghanistan on the issue.

"Initial research reveals a serious lack of morphine and other opiates on the global medical market,'' the agency said when the study was announced in March. "Because of its present situation, Afghanistan could play an important role in the production of essential medicines for the world.''

The French study's results are to be released in September at an international drug conference in Kabul, the Afghan capital. Rao said the Afghan government should learn from India's mistakes and do all it can to eradicate opium farming.

The United States imports 80 percent of its opium for pharmaceutical companies from India and Turkey, a policy up for review next year. U.S. drug companies processed 357 tons of opium, almost two-thirds of global consumption, in 2003, according to the most recent figures available from the International Narcotics Control Board.

Indians who have money often turn to an expensive opium-based medicine imported from the United States because it is easier to get than cheap, locally produced morphine. Nevatia's family paid a Kolkata pharmacist about $10 for each Johnson & Johnson Durogesic patch, more than five times the cost of a three-day supply of opium tablets.

But licensing hasn't stopped traffickers, aided by corrupt officials, from getting opium and other drugs, Rao said.

"With the support of local police and politicians, they convert this opium into 'smack,' '' slang for heroin, said Vinod Kumar Shahi, a lawyer in Lucknow, capital of northern India's Uttar Pradesh state. Shahi has learned a lot about the drug trade in 20 years of defending many of the region's top gangsters.

By helping traffickers, police can earn 50 times their official monthly salary of about $230, Shahi said. So they pay large bribes to superiors to be posted at police stations in the opium belt of northern India, he said. Tons of tarlike opium gum are skimmed off India's legal supply each year and sent to ad hoc chemists. With a plastic tub, a cup and chemicals easily found on the black market, they make the low-grade heroin base known as "brown sugar'' on the street. There, illegal morphine is worth as much as 25 times what the government pays for it, Rao said.

India is a transit country for almost-pure Afghan heroin, which is smuggled in from neighboring Pakistan, often in inflated tire tubes that are floated across rivers along the border. The high-grade heroin produced from Afghan opium accounts for about 87 percent of the world supply, according to the United Nations. Indian drugs also go south to Sri Lanka, where guerrillas with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam use money from heroin trafficking to fund their war for independence.

Meanwhile, those who need the painkilling peace that opium-based drugs brings go without.

"The pain is spreading,'' Shyam Sundar Nevatia said from his bed, in a raspy whisper, in May. "It's all over the body. Sometimes the pain moves slowly, and sometimes it's intense.''

Before he retired, Nevatia ran his own steel-trading company, and set up a charitable foundation to provide medicine to the poor in the name of his late wife, who died of cancer.

On May 21, he died in his bedroom.

Read more:

• The Kabul International Symposium on Global Drug Policy
  September 25-29 2005, Kabul—The Senlis Council is organizing The Kabul International Symposium on Global Drug Policy, a high level international conference that will bring drug policy experts from around the world to meet with Afghan government officials at both the national and provincial level along with other key stakeholders and international organizations present in Afghanistan.

• Afghanistan not ready to legalize opium production
  KABUL, May 16, (Christian Science Monitor) By Ben Arnoldy—A Paris group says there's demand for medicine made from poppies. But Afghan officials say they can't police the trade.
  
  

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Afghanistan Watch is prepared by Carl Robichaud, a program officer at The Century Foundation.

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