US Marine Corps. Marine guards a poppy field in Marjah, Helman Province.
Look at the awful heroin problem in Russia, directly a function of opium flowing from Afghanistan, with at least 2 million addicts officially acknowledged, maybe 2.5 or even 3 million say the UN and NGOs.
Now, 10 percent more HIV/AIDS cases. Miserable.
The Russian government has resolutely resisted the theory of "harm reduction" promoted in the West, clean needle programs, methadone maintenance, even safe-injection sites. Russians these days tend to think they should send young addicted men to monasteries to first sweat and chop wood, then pray -- like this program. There are few clinics and people send their kids to the Baltics or even Europe or the US if they can afford it, and then they get wound up in those crazy unregulated boot camps that are supposed to terrorize kids straight.
I'm skeptical of harm reduction, not because I don't understand the theory or don't believe it might do some good or even that there are programs that yield good numbers. Yet even Wikipedia illustrates the lack of clarity in the numbers and the outcomes and the goals in terms of how many people are saved from death or disease.
Regrettably, we're getting to see in Russia a vast experiment in *not* encouraging harm reduction, and the result seems to be more HIV/AIDS cases.
Why am I skeptical? Because of the religious ferocity with which some preachers of this ideology go about it, and the lack of options they seem to create for actual addiction treatment.
Of course, we don't know that this ominous 10 percent increase in Russia actually came from the crackdown against harm reduction or failure to make good on promises to open harm reduction programs with the UN and NGOs.
It could be more about the flow of drugs increasing, now that the US has given up on the idea of trying to eradicate the sources in Afghanistan's opium fields.
"US forces no longer eradicate," as a military source put it.
Of course, Russian drug officials see it differently and even accused the US of conniving with Afghan drug producers.
Apparently the UK continued eradication for a time and the Afghan drug officials were divided.
The UN says that eradication was only getting rid of 4 percent of the fields at great economic and human cost, and the US felt they couldn't destroy crops after a lot of losses from fighting and had to give villagers a chance to recover.
This is quite the RT interview with Afghan Counter Narcotics Minister Zarar Ahmad Osmani, who says if they destroy opium fields, the angry children of the farmers will join the Taliban. He describes all this effort at burning crops in some areas, jailing 5,000 dealers, coping with 960,000 addicts, etc. Then...RT accuses him of being bribed to get his nomination and being mixed up in the drug problem. He denies the claim.
The net result of the no-eradication policy seems to be that more Afghans and Russians become addicted and then die, taking down others with them who may not have been addicts.
