On and off for over a decade, the Central Intelligence Agency conducted an audacious highly classified program to covertly manipulate Afghanistan’s lucrative poppy crop, blanketing Afghan farmers’ fields with specially modified seeds that germinated plants containing almost none of the chemicals that are refined into heroin, The Washington Post has learned.
The program’s disclosure comes as the war on narcotics is again dominating the security agenda.
President Donald Trump has declared war on drug cartels in the Western Hemisphere, ordering more than a dozen lethal strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, designating cartels as terrorist groups, and moving a vast naval and air force to the region. He has also authorized the CIA to take aggressive covert action against drug traffickers and their supporters.
In Afghanistan in the early 2000s, the burgeoning opium trade was thwarting U.S. goals, as American troops engaged in a deadly struggle to defeat the Taliban, eliminate terrorist groups and stabilize the weak Western-backed government. Afghan heroin fueled corruption in President Hamid Karzai’s government and in the provinces. It helped pay for the Taliban’s weapons and equipment. And it accounted for the majority of global heroin supplies, with most of the drugs bound for Europe or the former Soviet Union.
Western allies and U.S. government agencies argued bitterly over which strategies would dent the crop without undermining rural Afghan support for Karzai. Diplomats and drug enforcement officials debated everything from aerial herbicide spraying to purchasing the entire Afghan crop and sending it overseas to be processed into medicine.
Unbeknownst to almost all of them, the CIA was operating its own secret heroin-eradication program, run by the spy agency’s Crime and Narcotics Center, which was flush with funds during the Afghan war. The airdrops of modified poppy seeds began in the autumn of 2004, three people familiar with the program said. The operation was paused at least once and ended about 2015, those familiar with it said.
Once the seeds were dropped, the goal was for the plants sprouting from them to cross-fertilize with native plants and become the dominant strain over time, degrading the overall crop’s potency.
The American plants not only contained virtually no morphine, but they were bred to sprout early and produce especially vivacious red flowers, making them attractive to Afghan farmers who, the CIA hoped, would harvest and replant their seeds.
I would think that the primary issue is the potency of fentanyl vs heroin, as fentanyl is far more likely to cause an overdose and to be misdosed than heroin. Fent might have been in the supply on a technical basis in 2013, but it wasnt popularized whatsoever. The average American did not know what it was, and the average user was probably not taking it (at least knowingly).
The spike in 2017 and rise beforehand probably correlates with increased presence of fentanyl in the US market, courtesy of China. Most US heroin was coming via Mexico and not highly related to the Afghanistan poppy production. As the current article notes, most of that production was supplying heroin to Europe and the eastern hemisphere.
China, circa 2014-2015 and just before, was ramping up their supply of illicit analogue research chems to the US. It seems like that mostly dwindled down to just focusing on Fentanyl, and then fentanyl took over as the primary illicit opiate. This also correlates with the same time period that the US was significantly tightening restrictions on legitimate pharmaceutical opiates like Oxycontin. Around 2014-2016 large numbers of patients who, for better or worse, had been legally prescribed pain pills were being cut off of them. Which drastically increased the market of people seeking illicit opiates.
I would think the overall spike is due to the increase in market size due to restricting pain pills, the popularization of fentanyl as a specifically sought substance, the ease of importing fentanyl by bad actors (given that it is a far stronger substance by weight), and the significantly higher likelihood of the end user overdosing. Due to it being a stronger substance, when it is cut with other mediums it would make any given part of the final sold product a toss up in terms of strength. One part of the cut mix might have hardly any fent, while another corner of it might have a lethal dose, even if the user is taking the same amount of the final mixture. The process of producing heroin created a more homogeneous product even if it was cut before making it to the end user. It wasnt a matter of a few grains here of there that meant life or death for the user.
Plus you factor in that junkies have a penchant for seeking out batches that have caused overdoses rather than avoiding them, because they are looking for high strength even if it might kill them. Yet another reason why fent became so popular that it displaced heroin.
I think very little of it has anything to do with Afghan heroin production to be honest