Word: opiumeators
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...with an audacious mission: to stamp out all heroin and cocaine production worldwide in 10 years. Yeah, sure. But before you sell him short, take note of what he has already done since taking over the U.N. Drug Control Program last September. Responding to reports that opium production in Afghanistan had shot up 25%, he flew to Kandahar and personally persuaded the country's radical Taliban rulers to halt future planting in exchange for help in reconstructing a factory that will provide jobs for impoverished residents. A few weeks ago, the Taliban publicly burned two tons of opium, enough...
...cutting off production calls for tightening international controls over chemicals that go into making the finished product and better tracking of money-laundering operations. He wants to offer farmers a viable substitute for the lucrative poppies and coca that produce heroin and cocaine. Close to 90% of the opium used to make heroin comes from tightly confined areas in Afghanistan and Burma. "Not only can we spot all the growing areas by satellite," says Arlacchi, "we can also see the alternative areas growers could move...
Similar substitutions have been tried in the past, but Arlacchi insists they were never systematically carried out. In Burma, Wa tribesmen stopped growing opium poppies altogether, but when an alternative-development program that had been promised was delayed two years, the tribesmen went back to poppies. Laos, which used to produce 3.5 tons of opium annually, recently switched to coffee, rice and chili farming under a U.N. pilot project. So far this year the Lao have cut opium production to a few hundred pounds. In Peru crop substitution has cut coca production 40%. "A million dollars," says Arlacchi, "can have...
...pinkness assumed, Co-op community offers open arms, as well as a comfortably mellow living environment. Upstairs in 1705 Mass. Ave one finds the "Lounge," an opium den-style lounge christened by an initial misspelling. Nothing like blue lights, Oriental rugs and the right music to set the mood. Amidst rumbles of reggae, folk and rap, the self-proclaimed "official music of the Co-op" is not the Dead, but pure funk. The Lounge also has its own band, whose members happen to be away for the semester. Several of the rooms house guitars and other instruments, and a variety...
...dire need of foreign currency, the junta has sold off Burma's timber, oil and gas to multinational corporations, has turned a blind eye to the flourishing opium trade and has gone begging to multinational banks and international donors. The foreign reserves it gains allow the regime to buy weapons and maintain a brutal control exercised in the 1998 massacres of demonstrators and students. The military establishment has maintained its power over much of the country despite rebellion by oppressed ethnic minorities and the democratic election which the military lost...