Why Not Just Buy All the Opium?

Opium Poppies-Source: Wikimedia Commons

Over the past decade, the United States has spent $7 billion dollars trying to eradicate opium in Afghanistan (Security Inspector General).  The result of this policy has been an all-time high in opium poppy production.  This crop has an annual "farm gate" value of $.85 billion dollars (Al-Jazeera) and contributes to the employment of about 3.3 million Afghans (Guardian) out of a total workforce of about 7.7 million (CIA World Factbook).  Given the relative expense and ineffectiveness of the current policy of interdiction and eradication, why not just buy the opium?

Money equals political power everywhere on earth and while here in the United States industries like banking, energy, and health care lead to bribery lobbying, in Afghanistan opium leads to the corruption of government officials and the financing of warlords.  This is one case where simply throwing money at the problem might be the best course of action.

Some will say this amounts to us bribing the Afghans not to commit crimes and my rebuttal to that is: So?

Our eradication and interdiction policy is a failure for many reasons, but among them we are not providing any other source of income that even approaches the profitability of selling opium.  Our current policy relies on citizens of a country with a per-capita GDP of $1,100 annually, a life expectancy of 50 years, and a literacy rate of 28% to forgo the most lucrative job in the country because of some abstract moral argument about addicts in rich countries thousands of miles away (CIA World Factbook).  Good luck with that.

If we were to purchase the opium crop at least we could remove a source of funding for the Taliban and reduce the influence of militants and middleman criminals who purchase the opium to produce heroin for lucrative foreign markets.  It could also help to build relationships with the local population and make them partners with us rather than the Taliban.  This shouldn't be seen as a panacea for opiate addiction or for Afghanistan, but rather as a pragmatic step to control the supply of opiates and reduce the influence of drug money. Without addressing the demand side of the drug market all other policies will prove to be failures.

I wish I could take credit for this idea, but I can't.  It has been suggested by others and an internet search yielded little reliable information as to where the idea originated, either way a good idea is a good idea.

Sources:
 Al-Jazeera
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia/2014/11/afghanistan-sees-rise-poppy-cultivation-20141112115426363345.html

CIA World Factbook
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/af.html 

Security Inspector General Afghanistan Reconstruction
http://www.sigar.mil/pdf/quarterlyreports/2014-04-30qr-section3-security.pdf#page=28

The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/aug/28/afghanistan.drugstrade1