Afghanistan: Opium

When we marched from Kandahar to Kelat, there were no supplies at all of opium.

Col. W.W. Biscoe, Minutes of Evidence taken before the Royal Commission on Opium (1894)

It is in the western and eastern parts of this mountainous band on either side of India that are to be found the world’s two most important illicit opium-producing regions in the present day, respectively the Golden Crescent and the Golden Triangle. Certainly it has not always been this way.

Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, “Geography and Opium,” Les territoires de l’opium (2002)

Since war started in Afghanistan, there’s no other business for us.

Haji Abdul Ali, “Afghan Diary: Bizarre Bazaar,” Newsweek (February 8, 2002)

Although this area had zero heroin production in the mid-1970s, the CIA’s covert war served as the catalyst that transformed the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands into the world’s largest heroin producing region.

Alfred W. McCoy, “The Opium Wars in Afghanistan,” TomDispatch (March 30, 2010)