Afghanistan’s Poppy Problem Looks Cheap to Solve?
December 9th, 2005A convincible.org reader points out an interesting report on NPR and an organization that exposes the abuse of science and statistics:
I would like the editors of convincible.org to be aware of the following media watchdog group: STATS. This morning on my public radio station, I heard Maia Szalavitz from STATS on Marketplace discuss Afghanistan’s “Poppy Problem”. (Hear it with this link.) She claimed that legalizing the opium trade by allowing Afghan farms to avoid the black market would reduce the effects of terrorism. According to her report, the U.S. could buy all of their 10,000 tons of crops for $600M. Much less than the $788M budgeted to destroy the crops.
Could this be true? Ms. Szalavitz claims that use of opium in prescription medicines have a very low addition rate. I personally have no interest in getting more drugs into the U.S. market, but the thought that U.S. free trade could help the Afghans and reduce the threat of terrorism is a strong motivator. How would our public policy makers debate this topic? Is it simply a static policy where “we will not yield on the drug issue”?
Who is watching the watchdogs? Is it possible that the figures from STATS are being misread?
Dave
