Word: opium
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Could Afghanistan's opium boom be over? Perhaps. According to the latest report of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, opium cultivation has crashed in just one year, with prices at their lowest level since the late 1990s. "The bottom is starting to fall out of the Afghan opium market," says Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the agency, which released its annual opium survey on Sept...
...instance, creating a mobile-banking network helps the fight against al-Qaeda. The benefits of nation-building programs are often indirect, and hard to measure. (Ultimately, the hope is that access to banking will make farmers less reliant on loans from drug smugglers, and so less likely to grow opium, which helps finance al-Qaeda and the Taliban.) (Read "Is the Taliban Stockpiling Opium...
...country with not only many possible futures, but (as it were) many pasts. There is a crude but commonly held thumbnail sketch of modern Chinese history that goes something like this: Two centuries ago, European powers tried to open a hermetic society to trade; they failed until the Opium Wars forced the issue; China then entered an era of foreign domination and internal chaos, which ended with the imposition of political stability by the Communist Party in 1949; in 1978, after another round of internal unrest, China chose to modernize its economy and adopted market mechanisms to do so, with...
Davy's not here, man. (Coleridge was less impressed. As an opium addict, he was used to harder stuff...
...looks more like an Ibizan beach town than a Laotian village. But no, you didn't take a wrong turn at the Thai border. This is Vang Vieng - a farm town turned full-moon party, smack in the middle of a communist state. Once a resting place for opium-addled sojourners on sweet, slow tours of the East, Vang Vieng is now a haven of a different sort. It has become a popular stopover for gap-year students on Southeast Asia's well-trodden holiday trail - and erstwhile young bankers spending some of that severance pay. Drug dens have given...