Iowa, heroin and Afghanistan

Heroin's surging popularity among Iowans has alarmed officials and concerned citizens across the state. Indeed, the Governor's Office of Drug Control Policy reports that 'medicine/opioid abuse is Iowa's fastest growing form of substance abuse … leading to more heroin use too.” Heroin will become a larger problem, at least in the short term, as doctors begin dispensing fewer and more tightly controlled opioid prescriptions. More Iowans, desperate for that opiate-induced sense of painless well-being, will turn to heroin as a cheap substitute for expensive and difficult to obtain prescription opioids.

The plentiful supply of increasingly pure (and dangerous) heroin means it can cost as little as one-eighth as much as OxyContin, according to the DEA. The Cedar Rapids Police Department reports that in 2015 heroin was involved in about two-thirds of all drug overdoses, and the number of such incidents has tripled over the last three years. Heroin is now so pure that addicts can snort or smoke it, no longer having to inject it intravenously.

Why? In 2015 Afghanistan produced the largest opium poppy crop in the history of the world. The recent Afghan boom has increased heroin's purity and driven down prices globally. Afghanistan's opium, about 90 percent of the world's total, is refined into heroin and smuggled past winking Afghan officials into Central Asia, Europe, and beyond. Mexican traffickers dominate U.S. wholesale networks, sometimes mixing Afghan and Latin American heroin.

Proceeds from the opium trade make up about half the Taliban's funding, generated from 'taxation” and protection rackets. Drug money is also the top corrupter of Afghan government officials and undermines the rule of law in Afghanistan. In 2007 the drug trade comprised about 33 percent of Afghanistan's total economic output, according to the State Department's International Narcotics Control Strategy Report. Proportionally, that's equivalent to all U.S. economic activity west of the Mississippi being dedicated to narcotics. Today Afghanistan is the world's only narco-state.

In 2006 I began working on counternarcotics issues at the U.S. State Department and was shocked by the ineffective anti-poppy methods used by Afghan police. The U.S. supported a special police unit that would literally walk through fields hitting opium poppies with sticks. Political appointees in the Bush administration favored spraying glyphosate (a farm herbicide) on poppies, like Colombia has used against coca, but the Defense Department effectively nixed that approach. My office purchased scores of small quad-bikes (ATVs) and shipped them to the Poppy Eradication Police, who used them to harrow harvestable fields and help eradicate over 19,000 hectares of opium poppies. The following year, in part due to the increased risk of eradication, Afghanistan cultivated 38,000 fewer hectares of opium poppies.

Despite this modest improvement, I was not satisfied with a policy of poppy eradication by a central police unit, and convinced Secretary Condoleezza Rice to back a large-scale incentive program to reward Afghan provinces for reducing poppy production. Unfortunately, due to the change of U.S. administrations, this new policy was never fully implemented.

The Obama administration chose to de-emphasize efforts to reduce Afghanistan's opium production, while focusing on badly needed U.S. prevention and drug treatment programs. As a result, by 2014 eradication of Afghan poppies had fallen to only 2,692 hectares, compared to 19,047 in 2007. Afghan opium production is skyrocketing and drug money is helping fund the Taliban's bloody resurgence, while undermining and corrupting the struggling government of Afghanistan. Cheaper, purer, and deadlier heroin is heading to Iowa. As the Wicked Witch of the West said, 'Poppies …, Poppies. Poppies will put them to sleep.” That's true, from Afghanistan's Helmand province to the streets of Cedar Rapids and Des Moines.

l Ron McMullen, a native of Northwood, Iowa, is a former U.S. ambassador, and now teaches at the University of Iowa.