As the United States tries to persuade Afghan president Hamid Zarzai to use herbicides on the opium crop, I have a question. Where are the pharmaceutical companies currently buying their raw opium that they need to make codeine and morphine? We act like opium farmers are pure evil, but a tremendous amount of legitimate opium farming must be going on. Who is doing it? Where are they doing it? Any possibility that Afghan farmers can get in on the action?

The United Nations says that Afghanistan produces 93% of the world’s opiates. How do we define the legitimate farmer?

Because it isn’t going to win any friends to go around spraying Afghan fields, which will inevitably kill off the other crops (mainly food) which they are growing side by side with the opium.

But officials said the skeptics — who include American military and intelligence officials and European diplomats in Afghanistan — fear that any spraying of American-made chemicals over Afghan farms would be a boon to Taliban propagandists. Some of those officials say that the political cost could be especially high if the herbicide destroys food crops that farmers often plant alongside their poppies.

“There has always been a need to balance the obvious greater effectiveness of spray against the potential for losing hearts and minds,” Thomas A. Schweich, the assistant secretary of state for international narcotics issues, said in an interview last week in Washington. “The question is whether that’s manageable. I think that it is.”

Asst. Secretary Schweich has a typically sanguine view. I’d be more inclined to listen to the intelligence folks that say spraying will be a major problem. But, speaking of intelligence, the best way to eradicate opium farming might be to enlist the Taliban (or, at least, their arguments) in the effort. When they were in power they did more to cut heroin production than anyone before or since. It’s against their version of Islam to sell dope to people, although their leadership still found a way to profit off the trade.

Making a religious argument against opium farming might be more effective than any other conceivable strategy…so get some preachers on the payroll and create a new marketing product.

A United Nations report in August documented a 17 percent rise in poppy cultivation from 2006 to 2007, and a 34 percent rise in opium production. Perhaps more important for the effort to stabilize Afghanistan, officials said, the Taliban has been reaping a windfall from taxes on the growers and traffickers.

The problem is most acute in the southern province of Helmand, a Taliban stronghold. It produced nearly 4,400 metric tons of opium this year, almost half the country’s total output, United Nations statistics show.

There is so much pain being created in Iraq that they could probably consume a 17% rise in poppy cultivation in pain-killing medications alone. One thing is clear…after six years, all opium eradication efforts have failed and failed spectacularly. The U.S. government wants Afghanistan to use a herbicide called glyphosate, which they claim is less toxic than table salt. The CIA, the Pentagon, and our European allies are all opposed to this strategy because they think it will become a huge propaganda boon to the Taliban, who will cast it as chemical warfare against the peasantry.

So far, Karzai has refused to use the herbicide. One solution might be for U.S. pharmaceutical companies to buy-up the crops, thereby limiting its availability for conversion into illegal narcotics. The government could work in tandem to mitigate against market pricing issues, or to offset the costs.

Seems like a better idea than anything we’ve tried so far.