My heart bleeds

No, really it does.

UPI is reporting that a fungal infestation is harming the opium poppy crop in Afghanistan.  So the narco-economy of that particular 3rd world craphole is going to suffer, which means that all of Karzai's cronies that can't make it doing something honest for a living will suffer.

Good.

Look, I think that the Taliban and their ilk are the wrong answer in Afghanistan due to their record on human rights, especially to women and non-Muslims.  But the one thing they did that I agreed with was to ban the production of opium in Afghanistan and then to ruthlessly enforce that ban.  (Although I guess they've lost that particular conviction now that they have to finance an insurgency.)  Money from the sale of opium and the greed that comes with that money has tainted our 'liberation' of Afghanistan.  Personally, I feel we switched out an Islamist repressive regime for a cleptocracy fueled by U.S. foreign aid and the proceeds from narcotics trafficking.  Wow, what a difference in results.

I personally don't have a beef with someone using heroine if they don't hurt anyone else doing it.  You want to inject poison into your veins and die either very slowly and ugly through chronic opium addiction or go quick and ugly through an OD?  Have at it, as long as you're an adult, and your use and eventual death won't hurt anyone else.

But it should be made legal, and the transportation of the product, from 3rd world fields to the local pharmacy, should be done in the open, where purity can be regulated.  Doing this would take out all of the tin-hat warlords, underworld smugglers, and dirty warehouse labs and cutting operations out of the picture.  Along with this would go all of the attendant crime that goes with illicit use of the drug.

I personally hope that the Afghan warlords and everyone else that moves the poison from the Afghan poppy fields to the dealer on the street hurt so bad financially that they turn on each other and cull our collective herd a bit.  And I hope this particular fungus spreads from Afghanistan to the rest of the opium producing regions.