THE Afghan government has ruled out licensing its country's poppy crops and allowing Britain and the US to buy the harvest for conversion into legitimate medical painkillers such as morphine, The Herald can reveal.
The Foreign Office admitted yesterday moves to curb cultivation of the opium poppies by legalising and controlling the raw narcotic product had been vetoed by President Hamd Karzai.
The opium paste collected by farmers refines down into 90% of the heroin sold on Britain's streets and is worth more than £1.5bn a year to growers and traffickers.
UN sources claim Kabul's reluctance to legalise the opium stems more from the fact that a number of senior politicians backed by the West are key players in the trade or receive regular payments from traffickers to turn a blind eye.
Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells said: "We have considered options for the licit cultivation of opiates in some detail. This has been ruled out by the Afghan government as a means of tackling the trade."
A British-backed effort to eradicate 22,000 hectares of poppies using Afghan police officers managed to destroy just 1200 hectares before local farmers and landowners managed to bribe them to stop.
A British diplomatic source said: "A hectare of poppy is worth £3500 in opium. Afghan government officials negotiated a price of £500 per hectare to leave the land alone. Corruption's endemic. That corruption goes right to the top. It's the Afghan way."
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