And by ‘high’ I just mean the opium levels produced. Never sample your product, isn’t that the drug dealer’s motto?

Anyway, I thought that this was one of the reasons that we (US + international community etc etc) ultimately sent our troops into Afghanistan in the first place? Oh no wait, it was to kill bin Laden… that went well didn’t it? You would think that being abject failures in that particular quest, we would at least have been able to prevent the poppy harvests.

What we’re told on the tube is that the farmers grow poppies because they make a lot of money doing it. Growing ‘normal’ crops doesn’t pay. So why aren’t the authorities (aka us) helping the farmers grow something useful and profitable? What we see is our troops patrolling these troubled areas, but that’s it. No videos of what help we provide (assuming we provide -any-), nothing showing us where our money goes (and recently we heard of schools built last summer that are now falling down after the winter, pathetic!), nothing except fighting. Poor old Afghanistan.