haram or not, if I was an afghan farmer I’d want strangers with gallons of weed killer to keep the hell off my property. I can respect that, even if that farmer grows heroin.

and after all the poppies are killed, can you even use that land to grow a less morally dirty crop? maybe it will take a year or so for the ground to recover?

what happens to the farmers in the meantime?

The local residents started attacking and the patrol, outnumbered and having nothing but small arms, had to retreat. Apparently this pattern is repeated quite often in Afghanistan.

When you threaten people’s livelihoods, they will repsond violently. One opium farmer told the reporter apologetically that he was aware that heroin was harming young people in the U.S. and elsewhere, but he and his family had to live, and he felt he had no alternative.

Of course, we would be in a much better position to respond, with both sticks and carrots, if vast amounts of military manpower and money weren’t being tied down in Iraq.

Although your points are well taken I am a bit conflicted on this as I’ve seen the toll of drug use both in my old neighborhood as well as from reading and hearing about the First Opium War (1839-1842) from older family members and friends. Heck, some familial ancestors were involved in attempting to stamp out the epidemic of opium use before the British army arrived.

However, the fact Americans and Western Europeans are pushing the drug bust so aggressively is historically ironic. The British government sent troops to fight in the First Opium War to force the Qing Imperial government to allow British merchants to push more opium on Chinese society as that was the only way they could balance out their trade deficit as the Chinese government and merchants had little use for other British/European goods. Moreover, the American merchant ships were involved in the opium trade during this era so the hypocrisy is quite telling.