In Case No One Reads the Comments

Here is a comment posted by my dear old friend Paul Torrisi:

First of all this is not anonymous I just don’t have an account. My name is Paul Torrisi and I am responding to “BBC- Afghanistan 'could become drug state'”. First of all I would like to respond to "The BBC's Roland Buerk in Kabul says it is easy to see why 2.3m people - a tenth of the population - is involved in opium, when a farmer can earn more than 10 times as much growing poppies than cultivating wheat." This is the same situation that the US ran into when "fighting" the cocaine production in Columbia with coffee farming switching to grow cocaine. It is impossible to expect people to produce one crop over another just because we tell them to, especially when one is worth ten times more than the other. Not to mention the reason they cannot sustain on producing grain alone is our fault. If we did not subsidize so much, the world price of grain would not be so low, and they could earn a sustainable wage. This is not about greed, the Afghan opium farmer, except for the drug lords, are not getting rich off opium production they are merely putting food on the table for their families. Instead of playing fair on the global economy, our farmers make a “living wage” producing grain while the rest of the world goes into poverty. This is a problem we are causing all over the world and we deserve the out growths. Let the Columbians grow cocaine. Let the Afghanis grow opium. They have got to put food on the table somehow. It is our fault that things are so bad and they have found the way to make us pay for it…get our kids addicted to drugs that fill their pockets at the same time. Until we agree to buy and sell things at a fair world price meaning not dump our massive surpluses on the third world and drive out their farming and agricultural sectors, let them grow the crops we don’t. There is another option we could start to grow opium, cocaine, marijuana and do it with our amazing American efficiency and drive the prices so low that even the third world won’t be able to compete. Then we will have full control and that is what this government wants isn’t it.

In the future, long comments such as this one should be e-mailed to me. I'll then put them up as individual posts.