In 1999, Afghan poppy farmers accounted for 75% of global opium production, producing about 4,000 tons. In 2000, the Taliban government, four years consolidating their power after dispatching the last of the exhausted warlords in 1996, clamped down and reduced Afghan production to nearly nothing. They had eradicated poppy production completely in the nine-tenths of the country they effectively governed and vowed to never allow poppy growing again.

The following year, the Taliban were ousted by invading American forces. Poppy production rebounded strongly. In the division of duties among NATO members who inherited the occupation of Afghanistan from American forces, responsibility for another round of poppy eradication was acquired by the British military. But under their watch, unlike under the very effective Taliban watch, Afghan poppy production has reached new heights and Afghanistan is today the source of over 90% of opium in the world. All the Taliban did to eradicate opium was to simply jail farmers who kept growing poppies and it took them only a few months. Opium production figures for other countries like Burma and Colombia do show some corresponding heights and dips during these wild swings in Afghan production, but not nearly enough increases to make up for lost Afghan production, nor do their figures show sufficient downsizing to balance rapidly increased Afghan production.

No sign of change

It would therefore stand to reason that total global production of opium itself declined steeply and rose steeply over these years. Health and police authorities in cities like Vancouver, with significant populations of heroin users, braced themselves for turbulence as addicts, deprived of heroin, switched to other drugs that might be more expensive on the street and that produce different health results, and then switched en masse back to heroin when its oversupply made it much cheaper again. But none of the expected wild fluctuations in global opium production showed up on city streets as increased or decreased heroin availability. Local prices for heroin on Vancouver streets, as in most cities in the West, have remained largely stable through all these years, indicating that supply of illicit street heroin had in fact remained stable too.

Three big questions suggest themselves: When global production of opium declined severely, who lost their supply? And when, in the years following the American toppling of the Taliban, when Afghan production increased massively, who got those supplies? The prices fetched by the sale of opium from poppies grown by Afghan farmers is widely believed to pay for the armaments and personnel of the lethal insurgency confronting British, American, and Canadian soldiers occupying Afghanistan today. The question about who is buying the massively increased supply of opium is tied intimately to the third big question: Who is selling all the arms to the Afghan insurgents? All three questions may have the same answer.

In May of this year, Purdue Pharma, based in New Jersey, and its executives plead guilty to charges of pushing over $3 billion worth of an excessively potent opium-based drug called OxyContin. In their plea, which cost the company a fine of nearly $600 million, and the executives between $20 million and $30 million each personally, the company admitted that even before the drug was marketed, they knew OxyContin was far more potent than other competitors’ drugs. The US General Accounting Office, in its investigation, found OxyContin to be twice as potent as pure morphine. The company was charged with knowingly orchestrating a false advertising and physician-oriented education campaign to mislead doctors and the public into believing OxyContin was far less potent. The company produced faulty graphs and other false scientific documentation to convince doctors to over-prescribe the drug. To promote the drug, the company gave away coffee mugs and plush toys branded with the name OxyContin. The company has been forced to put aside tens of millions of dollars to cover many pending wrongful death lawsuits stemming from over-prescribed levels of the drug.

Hillbilly heroin

The opiate, based on a formula using oxy-codeine, was first introduced in 1996. “By 2000, parts of the United States, particularly rural areas, began to see soaring rates of addiction and crime related to use of the drug,” reported the New York Times. Purdue Pharma was by then selling over $1 billion worth of OxyContin annually. Dr Sidney Wolfe of Public Citizen was quoted in the New York Times saying of Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin, “The damage to the public from these white-collared drug pushers surely exceeds the collective damage done by traditional street drug pushers.” In the Appalachian region of the US where the drug proved very popular on the street, it is known as “hillbilly heroin.” The US Attorney for West Virginia said “The results of Purdue’s crimes were staggering.” The drug remains in circulation today, generating about $2 billion in annual sales. The lead lawyer defending Purdue Pharma in this case, and still representing the company as late as last summer, was none other than Rudolph Guiliani, former mayor of New York and currently front-running Republican candidate for President in next year’s elections running on a platform largely built around his role responding to 9/11, the event that precipitated and justified the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

Purdue Pharma, though active only in the United States, is the leading partner in a consortium it founded in 1957 called Mundipharma (literally, world drugs), a licensing and distribution company with offices and activities worldwide, including in Germany, Switzerland, Israel, Brazil, China, and India. It’s head office is in Cambridge, England and it reports annual sales approaching $2 billion worldwide.

No names, please

Purdue Pharma, as well as Mundipharma, are privately held companies and verifiable information about who the executives and members of the boards of directors are is notoriously difficult to establish. Certainly none of the companies’ websites divulge this information even though it is routinely a part of any company’s website. Other information regarding investors, capitalization, and profitability is also impossible to learn from these secretive companies.

But Purdue Pharma’s website claims the company’s main focus is opiate-based pain reliever innovations, and pioneering work in distribution channels around the world, in addition to work with criminal narcotics agents to stem the illicit abuse of pharmaceuticals and to crackdown on substitutes and counterfeits. “We also work with distribution channels and law enforcement agencies to assist in reducing diversion and illegal use of controlled substances,” says the website. For example, the company is the first to use radio frequency identification tags on bottles, boxes, and pallets of its shipments, tags that communicate with global positioning satellites to let company officials know at any instant exactly where in the world each bottle of Oxycontin is.

Congressional investigations into the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s revealed a network run by White House appointees and CIA officials involving illicit drugs, in this case cocaine-based narcotics from suppliers in South America, sold in American cities to raise money used to buy guns for Contra rebels fighting the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Arms were also sold to Iran, a sworn enemy of America, to raise money for the Contras. President George Bush’s father was heavily implicated in that investigation as head of the CIA and as vice president, but charges were never pursued.

The relevance of the Iran-Contra affair to the possible Afghan-Purdue affair is the establishment of a pattern of behavior involving heads of state in the US and Britain, drug operations both licit and illicit, and arms transfers.

Further questions

What needs to be investigated is whether Purdue Pharma, Mundipharma, or other British-American drug companies are secretly and illegally buying Afghan opium with arms transfers to Afghan warlords and using the opium to produce heavily opium-laced pharmaceutical products like OxyContin that they push in excessive volumes on both licit and illicit markets in America and other Western nations to generate high and unreported profits. The source of the arms used by insurgents in Afghanistan needs to be established, and then possible connections between those suppliers and pharmaceutical companies involved in the production and distribution of opiate-based drugs need to be investigated.

Such a drug-money-arms loop would not be unprecedented, and nor would it be unprecedented to find US and British military figures playing a role in facilitating the flow of both drugs and arms over international borders. Oliver North, the indicted official partially in charge of the Iran-Contra scheme, was all along a US marine corporal whose court defense was always that he was operating on military orders from above.

While many members of NATO are involved in Afghanistan militarily, it is US and British forces who are by far the most prominent and in the greatest numbers, particularly in the provinces where most opium is produced. And it is US and British pharmaceutical companies that seem to sell the most opium-based drugs around the world—a narcotic whose global supply went through massive gyrations even while causing no discernable difference to supplies of heroin on streets of Western cities. The question we must ask is, are companies like Mundipharma illegally trading guns for Afghan opium with the complicity of American and British armed forces, and making enormous profit margins by selling the opium in excessive amounts to Western nation’s citizens?