Opium Production Quotes

We made a mistake. We paid the farmers not to grow poppies. So all the other farmers started planting poppies. If we didn’t pay them, they had the poppies [to sell.]

The problem, therefore, reduced itself to [opium] production in Persia, Turkey, and Jugoslavia. The first of these countries declared that it could not restrict production without a loan of ten million tomans, customs autonomy, and a financial moratorium. The other two said that until other means of livelihood had been found for their peasant populations, production could not be limited.

The East India Company established a monopoly over the production of opium, shortly after taking over Bengal.

The Taliban is the worst...great heroin though.

It's going to be really interesting to see what the heroin market does in the next two years or so. One thing you can be pretty sure of. The Afghan peasants who grow poppies won't get rich. The money will end up in places like Dubai.

No nation alone, however great its vigilance, can erect a barrier high enough to keep out narcotics when opium is grown or drugs are manufactured without limitation or restriction. The nations of the world must be aroused to cooperate.

You have these crops of poppies that supply something like 90% of the heroin sold in Europe and actually represents more than half of the Afghanistan's GDP.

While the American proposals for the limitation of [opium] production may have been theoretically sound, the United States ignored the practical obstacles in the way of their achievement. In one sense these proposals were unfair, since they transferred the responsibility for suppressing the international drug traffic from the strong countries to lamentably weak governments such as those of China, Persia and Turkey. Financially, the United States stood to lose nothing and to gain everything by the acceptance of its proposals. The producing countries, as well as the governments of territories where smoking prevails, would on the other hand be obliged to give up revenues amounting to millions of dollars a year. In other words, the United States asked from the remainder of the world sacrifices which entailed no hardships for herself.