I've always wondered about the relationship between america's opiate habit and the afghan poppy harvest. The US army was burning millions (billions?) of dollars worth of poppies every year, to deny profit to the taliban. Could that not have been used to make pain pills? How do the incentives flow here?
There's no shortage of pain pills. GoodRX is a pharmacy benefit manager that doesn't collect any payments from users, it runs on marketing fees, so it gives some information about the real cost of drugs. Several weeks of Oxycodone costs $20 at the pharmacy:
> Could that not have been used to make pain pills?
To my knowledge, the industry has moved away from poppies that produce morphine (they still technically grow p. somniferum, but a special cultivar with low morphine content to discourage theft).
Instead they extract the opioid compound thebaine, which is then converted to powerful name-brand pain meds. This is why they're called "semi-synthetic opioids", because they require thebaine as the primary ingredient.
So yes, those could have been used to produce pain meds the "old-school" way but I doubt they'd be of any use to western pharmaceutical companies.
> The US army was burning millions (billions?) of dollars worth of poppies every year, to deny profit to the taliban.
I'm not sure that's the whole story, if you look at the statistics then it rather looks like poppy production has increased since the US/NATO occupation [0], at least compared to the, very low, numbers in 2000.
Turkey is one example of a country that successfully managed to legalize their poppy production, but it's questionable if that approach would work just as well in Afghanistan [1].
As I understand the talban were opposed to drugs and they did a good job of ensuring poppy was not grown in the country. (they had other problems, but aiding the illegal drug trade was not one)
