Just Say No

For all of former Bush administration official Thomas Schweich’s talk about the “myth that poppies are grown by destitute farmers who have no other source of income” – while the reality of an insurgency cultivating to wage terror is ignored – in today's "New York Times Magazine" article Is Afghanistan a Narco-State?, the larger taxpayer-funded myth is lost on him. Perhaps the better question would be, “Why is America even fighting a war on drugs in Afghanistan when it’s been losing that same battle at home for decades?” The most surefire way of eradicating the heroin trade does not involve aerial spraying Helmand and Kandahar but (as Schweich alluded to almost as an afterthought) America taking responsibility for its own culpability on the receiving end by reducing its demand. The “old-school Pentagon view that ‘we don’t do the drug thing’” that Schweich writes of so dismissively happens to be plain old common sense.