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Ana-Liofa On Personal Choice And The Heroin TradeAna-Liofa On Personal Choice And The Heroin Trade
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Ian,
Please let me reply to the issue of personal choice, and the heroin trade and so on that you've raised - important points I think - without actually responding "to" you... Just to address the topic for fun and information.
1) Cocaine and heroin use overwhelmingly start at a fairly early age in this country, when people making these choices are not legally responsible for their choices. As parents, and as a society, we recognize a reduced standard for our younger citizens and a duty to protect them from harmful choices.
2) Once these substances have been experimented with to a point, a physical addiction may and frequently does develop, which can last a lifetime, however short. This causes untold suffering, death, and economic harm. At this point using these substances is no longer strictly a "choice" in the same way that Marijuana usage is.
3) This leads to addiction of adults, because they made a bad choice as children. As outlined in 1, we try and avoid this.
To address the Heroin trade.
4) Heroin is an easy to make (in your own kitchen) extract of opium, a kind of sticky sap that is exuded by the poppy plant when it is scored with a knife. All poppies produce it, but some are more alkaloid rich than others. Poppies, unlike Coca, are incredibly easy to grow.. require little water, and no special climate other than hot. So heroin production will just move, if wiped out in one place, it appears in another. It would do just fine in Australia.
5) In actual fact, your reporter was wrong. The Taliban came as close as anyone ever has to wiping out the heroin growing in Afghanistan... heroin is against the Shari'a - and when the allies took over, the crop returned some. Historically, the Afghans vastly prefer growing Hashish, but the exigencies of war caused the switch in crops to something easier to grow. It used to be Turkey, and the Golden Triangle.
6) In stark contrast to this, Cocaine is made from Coca leaves... and Coca is incredibly hard to grow, and will only grow outside of a greenhouse in a very narrow set of countries in South America with the correct combination of soil, altitude, and climate. Fragile plant.
7) Hence, while Heroin has no center that can be attacked, Cocaine does.. we can stop the trade, because when we do the cultivation can't just move. Plus, Cocaine caused deaths are far higher. Heroin has a life style that kills, but with Coke it is the drug. Very old opium users are or were at one time common in the orient, but it is unlikely that your heart would last trying to duplicate the feat with Coke.
I'll leave the Iran-Contra affair on the table, along with the British occupation of a lot of the middle East and the Raj, and the "gift" of the Brits of Israel to the UN and the Zionists, not to mention the genocidal starving of the Irish while exporting massive amounts of grain and cattle from Ireland, mistreatment of aboriginal peoples all over, you name it.
We all make mistakes, even if it sometimes seem we pay for them forever.
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