War on Drugs

Legal opium importation from India and Turkey is conducted by Mallinckrodt, Noramco, Abbott Laboratories, and Purdue Pharma in the United States, and legal opium production is conducted by GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson and Johnson, Johnson Matthey, and Mayne in Tasmania, Australia; Sanofi Aventis in France; Shionogi Pharmaceutical in Japan; and MacFarlan Smith in the United Kingdom.[74] The UN treaty requires that every country submit annual reports to the International Narcotics Control Board, stating that year's actual consumption of many classes of controlled drugs as well as opioids, and projecting required quantities for the next year. This is to allow trends in consumption to be monitored, and production quotas allotted.

A recent proposal from the European Senlis Council hopes to solve the problems caused by the massive quantity of opium produced illegally in Afghanistan, most of which is converted to heroin, and smuggled for sale in Europe and the USA. This proposal is to license Afghan farmers to produce opium for the world pharmaceutical market, and thereby solve another problem, that of chronic underuse of potent analgesics where required within developing nations. Part of the proposal is to overcome the "80-20 rule" that requires the U.S. to purchase 80% of its legal opium from India and Turkey to include Afghanistan, by establishing a second-tier system of supply control that complements the current INCB regulated supply and demand system by providing poppy-based medicines to countries who cannot meet their demand under the current regulations. Senlis arranged a conference in Kabul that brought drug policy experts from around the world to meet with Afghan government officials to discuss internal security, corruption issues, and legal issues within Afghanistan.[75] In June 2007, the Council launched a "Poppy for Medicines" project that provides a technical blueprint for the implementation of an integrated control system within Afghan village-based poppy for medicine projects: the idea promotes the economic diversification by redirecting proceeds from the legal cultivation of poppy and production of poppy-based medicines (See Senlis Council).[76]

During the 1990s, the national debt increased by 75%, GDP rose by 69%, and the stock market as measured by the S&P 500 grew more than three-fold.

Over his term, Clinton would introduce welfare reform, while with Republicans in control of Congress, most major spending programs were opposed and government spending increases stayed relatively low.[citation needed]

From 1994 to 2000 real output increased, inflation was manageable and unemployment dropped to below 5%, resulting in a soaring stock market known as the Dot-com bubble. The second half of the 1990s was characterized by well-publicized Initial Public Offerings of High-tech and "dotcom" companies. By 2000, however, it was evident a bubble in stock valuations had occurred, such that beginning in March 2000, the market would give back some 50% to 75% of the growth of the 1990s. The economy worsened in 2001 with output increasing only 0.3% and unemployment and business failures rising substantially, and triggering a recession that is often blamed on the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks.

Wilson had been the CEO of a General Motors subsidiary, and had been impressed with the productivity of U.S. industry during World War II. This period of economic growth brought the U.S. out of the Great Depression, and was driven by the social imperative, called the "war effort," as directed by the needs of the Department of Defense. Wilson warned at the close of the war that the U.S. must not return to a civilian economy, but must keep to a "permanent war economy."[1] Wilson was made Secretary of Defense under Dwight D. Eisenhower, and was largely instrumental in reforming the Pentagon as an instrument for facilitating a closer relationship between the military and industry.

The term is used often in the case of the United States currently, which has by far the largest arms industry in the world. It is difficult to estimate the degree of dependence of the U.S. economy on its military and defense spending, but it is clearly enormous, and legislators fiercely resist defense cuts that affect their districts. In Washington State, an economist estimated in 2002 that in Western Washington 166,000 jobs, or about 15% of the workforce, depended directly or indirectly on military installations alone, not counting defense industries. In Washington State overall in FY2001, about $7.06 billion arrived in U.S. Department of Defense payroll, pensions, and procurement contracts—and Washington State was only seventh among the fifty states in this regard. Overall, U.S. spending on defense acquisitions and research is equal to 1.2% of the GDP.

Consumption

In the industrialized world, the USA is the world's biggest consumer of prescription opioids, with Italy one of the lowest.[78] Most opium imported into the United States is broken down into its alkaloid constituents, and whether legal or illegal, most current drug use occurs with processed derivatives such as heroin rather than with pure and untouched opium.

Poppies as medicine

In both India and Turkey, opium production is used for medicinal purposes, making poppy-based drugs, such as morphine or codeine, for domestic use or exporting raw poppy materials to other countries. The United States buys 80 percent of its medicinal opium from these two countries. However, there is an acute global shortage of opium poppy-based medicines some of which (morphine) are on the World Health Organisation's list of essential drugs as they are the most effective way of relieving severe pain. A recent initiative to extend opium production for medicinal purposes called Poppy for Medicine was launched by The Senlis Council which thinks that Afghanistan could produce medicinal opium under a scheme similar to that operating in Turkey and India

The "sinister conspiracy" you see is that it was the West intention to do this from the get go, but you've no evidence to support this.

See your conspiracy doesn't make sense. The INB governs the growth and control of opium, but as you point out it is a lucrative trade. Now for your sinister conspiracy to work someone has to want to grow more opium, but does not control the International Narcotics Board (who could simply allow the countries who already legally grow opium to grow more), right? But at the same time this conspiracy has to be powerful enough to control both the US Army and Nato forces.

You're referring to economy policy from sixty years ago, the world was a different place.

You're essentially suggesting that because it was successful 60 years ago, it's what the US government did post 911, you've no evidence aside from the fact that you think it might.

Tell me Offaly, was there a drive for War Bonds? Were people asked to donate scrap metal? The Draft? An Enlisted Reserve Corp? Massive population migration? Has the US economy turned from a manufacturing economy in the 40s to a service industry? Was there mass globalisation in the 40s?

You've absolutely no evidence to support your assertion.

The real money in pharmacy is in R&D and patenting new drugs, it's why you see the pharmaceutical industry fight tooth and nail over things like generic AIDs drugs.

The production of opiates, and morphine has been around for over a century, and poppies can be refined into opiates in the most primitive labs, which can be further refined into morphine or heroin, in cheap simple labs. There's no huge profit in marketing something abroad that can be made just a cheaply by the third world country once they have their own supply. From your own wikipedia link it says that shortages of morphine are due to an unwarranted fear of addiction and abuse.

And the above misses the point again. If there is such profit in increased opium production why not make the INB allow more countries to produce more opium legally rather than invade another country, and go through a costly war, spendings years, and billions of dollars in order to grow a drug that you can grow elsewhere without the hassle.

Simple question Offaly, and one you are studiously avoiding.

Offalycool wrote: »

The American economy is inseparable from the military industrial complex.

At the end of the Dot com bubble American business wanted a radical restructuring of the economy. Do you really believe America could afford not to go to war and sustain the mired of weapon contracts many of its biggest industries depend on.

Even Ireland has links to this lucrative business as has been shown in a recent Prime Time report.

Pharmaceutical companies wish to profit from the market. If opium addiction is a market they will capitalise on this.. both at home and abroad.

I find it easer to believe there was a plan going into Afghanistan, even if that plan has not paned out.

The fact remains that the opium problem that has manifested itself in Afghanistan,

it is not going to go away and will have to be dealt with in a profitable way by the international community.

It's really not that implausible to see many strategic ends to the occupation of Afghanistan. If you think Americans has not learned anything from history you give them less credit than I do.

Afghanistan
Just who is buying all that Afghan opium?
Recent gyrations in supply of opium from Afghanistan, with no corresponding difference in supply of illicit heroin on our streets, suggest an unknown customer snapping up the bulk of it
By Kevin Potvin

In 1999, Afghan poppy farmers accounted for 75% of global opium production, producing about 4,000 tons. In 2000, the Taliban government, four years consolidating their power after dispatching the last of the exhausted warlords in 1996, clamped down and reduced Afghan production to nearly nothing. They had eradicated poppy production completely in the nine-tenths of the country they effectively governed and vowed to never allow poppy growing again.

The following year, the Taliban were ousted by invading American forces. Poppy production rebounded strongly. In the division of duties among NATO members who inherited the occupation of Afghanistan from American forces, responsibility for another round of poppy eradication was acquired by the British military. But under their watch, unlike under the very effective Taliban watch, Afghan poppy production has reached new heights and Afghanistan is today the source of over 90% of opium in the world. All the Taliban did to eradicate opium was to simply jail farmers who kept growing poppies and it took them only a few months. Opium production figures for other countries like Burma and Colombia do show some corresponding heights and dips during these wild swings in Afghan production, but not nearly enough increases to make up for lost Afghan production, nor do their figures show sufficient downsizing to balance rapidly increased Afghan production.

No sign of change

It would therefore stand to reason that total global production of opium itself declined steeply and rose steeply over these years. Health and police authorities in cities like Vancouver, with significant populations of heroin users, braced themselves for turbulence as addicts, deprived of heroin, switched to other drugs that might be more expensive on the street and that produce different health results, and then switched en masse back to heroin when its oversupply made it much cheaper again. But none of the expected wild fluctuations in global opium production showed up on city streets as increased or decreased heroin availability. Local prices for heroin on Vancouver streets, as in most cities in the West, have remained largely stable through all these years, indicating that supply of illicit street heroin had in fact remained stable too.

Three big questions suggest themselves: When global production of opium declined severely, who lost their supply? And when, in the years following the American toppling of the Taliban, when Afghan production increased massively, who got those supplies? The prices fetched by the sale of opium from poppies grown by Afghan farmers is widely believed to pay for the armaments and personnel of the lethal insurgency confronting British, American, and Canadian soldiers occupying Afghanistan today. The question about who is buying the massively increased supply of opium is tied intimately to the third big question: Who is selling all the arms to the Afghan insurgents? All three questions may have the same answer.

In May of this year, Purdue Pharma, based in New Jersey, and its executives plead guilty to charges of pushing over $3 billion worth of an excessively potent opium-based drug called OxyContin. In their plea, which cost the company a fine of nearly $600 million, and the executives between $20 million and $30 million each personally, the company admitted that even before the drug was marketed, they knew OxyContin was far more potent than other competitors’ drugs. The US General Accounting Office, in its investigation, found OxyContin to be twice as potent as pure morphine. The company was charged with knowingly orchestrating a false advertising and physician-oriented education campaign to mislead doctors and the public into believing OxyContin was far less potent. The company produced faulty graphs and other false scientific documentation to convince doctors to over-prescribe the drug. To promote the drug, the company gave away coffee mugs and plush toys branded with the name OxyContin. The company has been forced to put aside tens of millions of dollars to cover many pending wrongful death lawsuits stemming from over-prescribed levels of the drug.

Hillbilly heroin

The opiate, based on a formula using oxy-codeine, was first introduced in 1996. “By 2000, parts of the United States, particularly rural areas, began to see soaring rates of addiction and crime related to use of the drug,” reported the New York Times. Purdue Pharma was by then selling over $1 billion worth of OxyContin annually. Dr Sidney Wolfe of Public Citizen was quoted in the New York Times saying of Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin, “The damage to the public from these white-collared drug pushers surely exceeds the collective damage done by traditional street drug pushers.” In the Appalachian region of the US where the drug proved very popular on the street, it is known as “hillbilly heroin.” The US Attorney for West Virginia said “The results of Purdue’s crimes were staggering.” The drug remains in circulation today, generating about $2 billion in annual sales. The lead lawyer defending Purdue Pharma in this case, and still representing the company as late as last summer, was none other than Rudolph Guiliani, former mayor of New York and currently front-running Republican candidate for President in next year’s elections running on a platform largely built around his role responding to 9/11, the event that precipitated and justified the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

Purdue Pharma, though active only in the United States, is the leading partner in a consortium it founded in 1957 called Mundipharma (literally, world drugs), a licensing and distribution company with offices and activities worldwide, including in Germany, Switzerland, Israel, Brazil, China, and India. It’s head office is in Cambridge, England and it reports annual sales approaching $2 billion worldwide.

No names, please

Purdue Pharma, as well as Mundipharma, are privately held companies and verifiable information about who the executives and members of the boards of directors are is notoriously difficult to establish. Certainly none of the companies’ websites divulge this information even though it is routinely a part of any company’s website. Other information regarding investors, capitalization, and profitability is also impossible to learn from these secretive companies.

But Purdue Pharma’s website claims the company’s main focus is opiate-based pain reliever innovations, and pioneering work in distribution channels around the world, in addition to work with criminal narcotics agents to stem the illicit abuse of pharmaceuticals and to crackdown on substitutes and counterfeits. “We also work with distribution channels and law enforcement agencies to assist in reducing diversion and illegal use of controlled substances,” says the website. For example, the company is the first to use radio frequency identification tags on bottles, boxes, and pallets of its shipments, tags that communicate with global positioning satellites to let company officials know at any instant exactly where in the world each bottle of Oxycontin is.

Congressional investigations into the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s revealed a network run by White House appointees and CIA officials involving illicit drugs, in this case cocaine-based narcotics from suppliers in South America, sold in American cities to raise money used to buy guns for Contra rebels fighting the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Arms were also sold to Iran, a sworn enemy of America, to raise money for the Contras. President George Bush’s father was heavily implicated in that investigation as head of the CIA and as vice president, but charges were never pursued.

The relevance of the Iran-Contra affair to the possible Afghan-Purdue affair is the establishment of a pattern of behavior involving heads of state in the US and Britain, drug operations both licit and illicit, and arms transfers.

Further questions

What needs to be investigated is whether Purdue Pharma, Mundipharma, or other British-American drug companies are secretly and illegally buying Afghan opium with arms transfers to Afghan warlords and using the opium to produce heavily opium-laced pharmaceutical products like OxyContin that they push in excessive volumes on both licit and illicit markets in America and other Western nations to generate high and unreported profits. The source of the arms used by insurgents in Afghanistan needs to be established, and then possible connections between those suppliers and pharmaceutical companies involved in the production and distribution of opiate-based drugs need to be investigated.

Such a drug-money-arms loop would not be unprecedented, and nor would it be unprecedented to find US and British military figures playing a role in facilitating the flow of both drugs and arms over international borders. Oliver North, the indicted official partially in charge of the Iran-Contra scheme, was all along a US marine corporal whose court defense was always that he was operating on military orders from above.

While many members of NATO are involved in Afghanistan militarily, it is US and British forces who are by far the most prominent and in the greatest numbers, particularly in the provinces where most opium is produced. And it is US and British pharmaceutical companies that seem to sell the most opium-based drugs around the world—a narcotic whose global supply went through massive gyrations even while causing no discernable difference to supplies of heroin on streets of Western cities. The question we must ask is, are companies like Mundipharma illegally trading guns for Afghan opium with the complicity of American and British armed forces, and making enormous profit margins by selling the opium in excessive amounts to Western nation’s citizens?

meglome wrote: »

Offalycool (love the name btw) the big problem with all your assertions is they really lack hard evidence. You or I can believe anything we like but to express it as fact to others I believe there should be evidence to back it up. Most of your evidence appears to be your own gut feeling that it is happening, which to be honest isn't going to make me a believer.