After the Taliban’s opium ban in the early 2000s, a heroin drought in Estonia led underworld chemists to start manufacturing fentanyl
This world is complicated.
However, let’s say the Taliban make good on cleaning up their act and do force out the heroin business. What then?
The opium industry itself came to Afghanistan partly because of the Soviet invasion and the CIA/Pakistani-backed mujahideen’s need to source cash, but also partly because of crackdowns in Turkey, Iran and Pakistan. Farmers grew opium legally in the hills of Anatolia until 1971, when the American government pressed Turkey into pushing the plantations east, into Iran, until the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Then, for a while, poppies flourished on the lawless Afghan-Pakistani border dominated by Pashtun tribes, until there, too, it was driven out by Pakistani authorities in the mid-90s.
This is what’s known as the “balloon effect” — if you squeeze the drug business on one end, it simply reappears on another.
The Independent
Niko Vorobyov is a government-certified (convicted) drug dealer turned writer and author of the book Dopeworld, about the international drug trade. You can follow him on Twitter @Lemmiwinks_III
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