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Afghanistan opium poppies hit by mysterious disease

Aunt Spiker

Aunt Spiker

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Afghanistan opium poppies hit by mysterious disease - Yahoo! News
Farmers in the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand, the source of around 90 percent of the world's opium, agreed the harvest will fall this year.

The farmers and other experts cited high rainfall in some areas, drought in others, free seeds for alternatives such as wheat and good prices for food crops, and a mysterious disease withering poppies in some areas.

Tests by the interior ministry were inconclusive and more were being carried out, said the agency's representative in Kabul, Jean-Luc Lemahieu, adding that "plagues, pests, blight" had hit Afghanistan's poppy crop in 2002 and 2006.
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Does anyone besides me wonder if this was developed in a lab somewhere?
 
Yeah, that was my thought too.
Seems to convenient.

Or it seems that God exists and he's on our side.
 
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Its not a mysterious disease. It happens all the time, just not in this big a scale normally.
 
Catz Part Deux said:
Yay for science!
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The article says the mysterious ailment is a fungus.. to add speculation to speculation (that this was deliberately induced) perhaps not yay for science.

If this genie were to get out of the bottle and spread to neighboring India's legal and globally sanctioned opium crop, the impact on a global market for legal pharmaceutical opiates production that is already under supplied (outside of a minority of "developed" countries that hog up all the legal production) could be very painful.

A better solution would be to buy the Afghan opium crop and produce cheap painkillers for humanitarian use, while making friends with the Afghan people instead of hobbling our efforts with back door eradication schemes. This way we can more readily satisfy demand when disasters such as Haitis earthquake occurs, or for remote third world clinics that are often working without the saving graces of this basic commodity due to restrictive allowances on who can and cannot grow the plant, as well as a hobbled allowance system for distribution that has 6 countries accounting for 75% of lecit opiate usage.
 
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The USA depends on heroin so no, I don't believe that some mysterious disease was created in a lab to kill poppies. At least not by our government.
 
It could be man made, or just as easily a result of climate change causing an increase in the incidence of pests. Agriculture is being plagued globally right now by climate change and pests are one of the complaints.
 
Seems like even the opium crop has tapped out.
 
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