I feel sorry for these Afghanistan Poppy farmers. Anderson Cooper is showing

[Maraya1969]

the Afghan army chopping down these poppy flowers and the little kids are saying "Why can't you leave some poppies for us?" And one farmer said "What do you want me to eat? Dust?"

And when I look at how beautiful these flowers are and being a believer in God I believe that God made them I can't understand how they can be bad or evil.

It is the same when I see them cutting down pot plants. It hurts me to see plants that put oxygen in the air pummeled into the ground.

There just has to be a better way. Maybe if Afghanistan allowed these poppies to be made into opium to be sold to pharmaceutical companies, (I know it is too expensive....fake is cheaper)


BTW - I can't seem to get photos on the forum anymore. Did something change here?

[Critters2]

1. I thought about selling 'em to the pharma companies, too

Didn't realize fake is cheaper. Although, I like to point out that "cheap" is a relative term. If the Taliban and their allies are empowered by these farmers selling on the black market, wouldn't it be "less cheap", as in more advantageous to them and us and everyone, to sell them to Big pharma.

Yeah, I know. You'd still have to convince the profiteers at Pfizer and Lily, et al.

What a mess!

[Kutjara]

5. One of the failures of capitalism is that...

...it has a very hard time accounting for externalities. Indeed, some argue that capitalism's success has been dependent largely on its ability to offload externalities onto society as a whole, thereby distorting the real costs of production. A good example of this is oil. For decades (and still, to a great extent) oil companies have been able to reap the profits of oil production, without having to pay the cost of the environmental damage their product causes. Consequently, society pays the cost while the oil companies reap correspondingly higher profits. Oil companies (and other producers of goods with large externalities) have little incentive to change this situation, for to do otherwise would reduce their profitability.

If you apply this to the situation in Afghanistan, it's clear that there is a great social good to be gained from giving the farmers a market for their poppy crops. Yet there exists no pricing mechanism that would incentivise pharma companies to use these poppies in preference to synthetic sources of opium. The fact that helping the farmers would do great good for society has no way of transferring itself to the corporate bottom line. Therefore, no private company would consider it. If the government were to subsidize the poppy farmers, so that poppy opium suddenly became cheaper than synthetic, pharma companies would no doubt jump at the opportunity, but the externalities would once again be borne by society (in the form of tax dollars being applied to subsidies), while the profits were enjoyed by the pharma companies. This might be an acceptable alternative from a common sense perspective, but I can just imagine the public outcry when it's announced that we the people are subsidizing opium production. Any politician that suggested it would be committing career suicide.

So civilization limps along with a wildly skewed pricing mechanism, corporations externalizing as many of their costs as possible, and government fearing to step into the breach either with regulation or subsidies. No wonder we're in such sorry shape.

[pitohui]

9. what great social good is that?

i am scratching my head as to what good benefit could come from humoring people by having them spend their lives doing something that doesn't need to be done

you know, there are real problems in the world that need to be addressed

if we are going to subsidize people who are displaced, like the opium farmers, subsidize them to do something useful, such as a "new deal" sort of thing, do you seriously think afghanistan has all the infrastructure it will ever need and so people need to be given make work?

i think at the end of the day, people are happier and feel more a part of society if they are doing something real rather than something fake

or is the assumption that they are too stupid and they would never find out that the opiates could be made more cheaply in a lab? so they would have a false sense of achievement? kind of how we treat first graders

i dunno, i'm a bit uneasy, it seems patronizing

[Kutjara]

11. You make some good points.

The problem as I see it is that almost any agriculture they could be subsidized to produce would almost certainly be more expensive than the equivalent produced elsewhere. The regions of the country that are not mountainous are of quite poor quality and suffer from extensive soil erosion and salinization. It would be cheaper to import most foods than to farm them in Afghanistan. That's one of the reasons farmers turned to poppies in the first place. And opium poppies fetch far higher prices than any other crop could hope to. Afghan farmers are not stupid. They've made the sensible economic decision to farm the crop that will yield the most income.

I'm not sure that paying the farmers to produce a crop that can be produced more cheaply elsewhere would necessarily destroy their sense of achievement. Did Russian subsidies on Cuban sugar demoralize the sugar farmers in the 1960s and 70s? No, because the sugar farmers felt they were contributing to the wealth of their country and helping to secure the revolution. Perhaps the Afghan farmers would look at the cash they would be injecting into their economy and feel they were contributing to national prosperity.

Perhaps subsidizing opium is not the longterm way forward. But it would be a practicable short term solution (even if we just destroyed the opium after we bought it), until the Afghan economy restructures itself around more "useful" industries.

[Jamastiene]

2. We should work to get poppies and marijuana on the endangered

plant species list so they won't keep cutting them down. :D

[begin_within]

3. I once grew them (Papaver Somniferfum)

You can order seeds as a garden plant. I grew it one year, and when the pods formed, I cut them with a razor blade, saw the juice ooze out, let it dry, then ate some. Nothing happened.

[Maraya1969]

4. I wonder why? And why can you grow poppies for your garden but not pot?

I know the answer to the second question of course.

[begin_within]

6. I don't know, but...

the large seed pods are often dried and used for decorations and in dried flower arrangments. For that purpose, the larger the seed pods, the better. It could be that some strains of Papver Somniferum have more of the "active ingredient" in opium than other strains. I ordered it from the Thompson & Morgan seed catalog about 10 years ago and grew it 1 year. It was very easy and the flowers were large. Out of curiosity I tried to get the juice and it did appear and dried, but it had no effect on me. Maybe something else has to be done to the dried juice to make it effective.

[pitohui]

7. well i don't, they kill people for a living

i can't romanticize this crap when i know people dead from heroin overdose

at the end of the day they want to put bread on their table by working as mass murderers, why should i respect them for doing this because they live in afghanistan when i would not tolerate them doing this in my own town?

heroin is not the same as pot, it kills, if they can't produce it for a legal medical market then they need to find honest work

i was once homeless and hungry when i was young, it did not give me license to kill others

well, we have different opinions, that makes horse racing, on a different note i
am seeing this photo posted okay, can you see it?

[Critters2]

8. My point, above, was that opium can be used for

legal meds. We ought to be looking for ways to use these Afghan-grown poppies for legitimate pharmacological uses. That seems like a win-win to me.

[pitohui]

10. a win-win would be directing labor toward something that actually needed to be done

i think we're posting at the same time but in short, i don't see the use of subsidizing people to do something that doesn't need to be done, when afghanistan has such huge infrastructure needs with real work that needs to be done -- subsidize training and education for that

would you subsidize my relatives in the tobacco industry to keep growing tobacco or is it only that people in far countries who are stupid and can't learn new things?

it just seems patronizing somehow ?

p.s. getting a bit heavy for the lounge! :-)

[Maraya1969]

15. I was ascared to post it in GD

:P

[Maraya1969]

13. I know methadone is a racket too but don't they use some sort of fake opium

to make that? There are many people who just stay on methadone for their lives. Any they pay a lot for it too. Too bad there were not a way to use those poppies for methadone making also.

[Maraya1969]

12. Yes I see it. Did you "copy link location" or "copy image location"?

Or something else. I used to be able to post the image location and the photo would show up.l Now I just get a link.

OK now I am getting the picture. :shrug:

[pitohui]

14. i see it!! you got it!

probably just a temporary blip on the photos

[bridgit]

16. Well, where to begin; I guess right here: it has been said that God gave humanity...

dominion over the world. No, not the crazy right-fundamentalist 'idea' of dominion, but dominion over the earth & the tree of life i.e. plants & their pharmacologies within yes: cannabis, hemp, opiates, but as well food, regular stuff = corn, lettuce, apples, carrots, etc. My brother Willy was given pharmaceutical morphine when he was passing kidney stones cause he was climbing up the wall and nothing would offer comfort. And I do not consider that cheating. That is dominion.

But these poppy guys in Afghanistan aren't thinking in those terms in the least. Neither do the pushers that destroy human life for profit. Working in the music bizz I've seen the end result, and none of it is pretty or chic.

"I hit the city and I lost my band. I seen the needle take another man. Oh, oh. The damage done."

Sure it's a pretty flower...pretty poison.