Afghan opium: License to kill - new info

[donsu]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HB01Df02.html

----
More than 60 delegations, mostly countries but also some multilateral agencies such as the World Bank, meet in London for two days this week to tackle development issues for Afghanistan. One of the more controversial topics to be tabled is how to deal with Afghanistan's opium fields, which last year produced about 4,200 tonnes of raw opium.
------------------

-snip-

In such a context, where both interdiction and development have failed to solve the "opium problem" in Afghanistan, because interdiction without development amounts to further deteriorating the livelihoods of opium farmers, and alternative development is far from having been implemented with adequate economic means and political determination, a rather new, but unrealistic, proposal has emerged: the licensing of Afghan opium for production of pharmaceutical morphine.

Described as "a truly winning solution" by many, the proposal of the Senlis Council, an "international drug-policy think-tank" based in Paris, consists of licensing Afghan opium for the production of legal medicines such as morphine and codeine as a way to respond to the urgent need to significantly reduce Afghanistan's illegal opium production and trade, but also as a way to overcome the "significant global shortage of opium-based medicines such as morphine and codeine", a problem "felt most acutely in the developing world".

-snip-

Thus, obviously, the world's medical consumption of opiates is far from being directly dependent on supply and demand, and price contingencies, as was actually hinted by the Senlis Council itself when it stressed that "in 2002, 77% of the world's morphine was consumed by seven rich countries: US, the UK, Italy, Australia, France, Spain and Japan", but that, according to official figures, "even in these countries only 24% of moderate to severe pain-relief need was being met".

-snip-

Of course, since 12 countries already produce raw opium materials to make morphine, codeine and thebaine, and have significantly increased the concentration of alkaloids in opium-poppy plants, the INCB, pursuant to the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, wishes to "to avoid the proliferation of supply sites" to prevent diversion of opium-poppy plants and seeds licitly produced to the illicit market.
-snip-
----------------------------------

names - who is making he money - question mark