The opioid crisis has killed thousands in the United States, and as more than 100 Americans die every day, opium poppy cultivation has hit a record high in Afghanistan in 2017. Coincidentally, President Donald Trump’s troop surge in Afghanistan has essentially been completed, boosting the number of service members on the ground from 11,000 to 14,000, the Pentagon said this week.
“We’ve just completed a force flow into Afghanistan,” Marine Lt. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff Director, said at a news conference. “The new number for Afghanistan is now approximately 14,000—might be a little above that, might be a little below that, as we flex according to the mission.”
Coinciding with the completion of the troop surge, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and Afghanistan’s Ministry of Counter Narcotics released a report claiming that the “area under opium poppy cultivation increased by 63% since 2016, reaching a new record high.”
The total area under opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan was estimated at 328,000 hectares in 2017, a 63% increase or 127,000 hectares more compared to the previous year. This level of opium poppy cultivation is a new record high and exceeds the formerly highest value recorded in 2014 (224,000 hectares) by 104,000 hectares or 46%. Strong increases were observed in almost all major poppy cultivating provinces.
The report also noted that opium poppy cultivation both intensified and expanded to new regions in 2017, decreasing the number of poppy-free provinces in Afghanistan from 13 to 10, and increasing the number of provinces affected by opium poppy cultivation from 21 to 24.
There is no single reason for the massive 2017 increase in opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan … Rule of law-related challenges, such as political instability, lack of government control and security, as well as corruption, have been found to be main drivers of illicit cultivation. also impact farmers’ decisions, for example scarce employment opportunities, lack of quality education and limited access to markets and financial services continue to contribute to the vulnerability of farmers towards opium poppy cultivation.
As a result of the increase in 2017, the report acknowledges, “The significant levels of opium poppy cultivation and illicit trafficking of opiates will probably further fuel instability, insurgency and increase funding to terrorist groups in Afghanistan. More high quality, low cost heroin will reach consumer markets across the world, with increased consumption and related harms as a likely consequence.”
As TFTP has previously reported, a former British Territorial Army mechanic, Anthony C Heaford released a report two years ago, and a series of photos, which he says proves that British and American troops are harvesting opium in Afghanistan.
It is also no secret that Afghanistan opium production has increased by 3,500 percent, from 185 tons in 2001 to 6,400 in 2015, since the US-led invasion.
Not only is the increase in opium poppy cultivation hurting civilians in Afghanistan and fueling the same terrorist groups the United States claims to be working to defeat, it has made Afghanistan responsible for producing 90 percent of the world’s opium supply.
That supply is having a direct effect in the United States where more Americans died from drug overdoses in 2016 than were killed in the Vietnam War. That number has only continued to increase in 2017, with more than 100 Americans dying every day—meaning that opioids are killing more Americans than car crashes and gun deaths combined.
When the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the excuse was to eradicate the Taliban—but in 2017, not only is the Taliban alive and well, the Afghanistan War has become the longest war in U.S. history, and President Trump has admitted that the United States’ strategy for the region does not include an exit anytime soon.
The Afghanistan War has cost American taxpayers more than $1 trillion over the last 16 years, and it has resulted in more than 31,000 civilian deaths. While the media does not publicize it, and most politicians won’t acknowledge it, the record number of deaths from opioid overdoses in the U.S. is a direct result of the record-high opium cultivation in Afghanistan—where U.S. troops are literally guarding the plants.
Rachel Blevins is a Texas-based journalist who aspires to break the left/right paradigm in media and politics by pursuing truth and questioning existing narratives. Follow Rachel on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. This article first appeared at The Free Thought Project.
This is absolutely amazing. How much would it cost to napalm every field that that wasteland and then salt the earth as the Romans did to Carthage? Certainly not a trillion dollars!
Did you know it was the Canaanites “Israelites” that performed the rites and rituals of Carthage? Did you know that Juduh-ites were kicked out of over 70 countries in 1600 years beginning with Carthage in 250, the Alexandria in 415 which only had the greatest library in history burnt down the next year by said Christian fanatics.
It turns out that the list has grown to over 350, starting in Samaria in 733 BC. I’ll just leave this nearly up-to-date list right here. Sources provided in almost all instances… https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a2cd3b24c9844e85a9f3a5c9230799a4f72a436966bf2951e0068952dd3f5690.png
That wouldn’t even be necessary to stop the production. This is what happens when the people truly in charge of our military are acting in the interest of the CIA/NWO/ZOG and not the citizens of the US and the world. The useful idiot goy machine is running full steam to provide money for these entities while millions broken Americans are killed by their product.
I personally find it ironic, that keeping the 99% well-fed, entertained, and out-of-pain, would be the death of them, like the Calhoun rat experiment.
If people were to live within their own means, and stop at the point of diminishing returns, this should look like a utopia — I mean, in terms of a survival situation.
I could keep myself occupied, interested, all day, every day, if only I had the strength.
There is nothing inherently wrong with a flower, which kills pain, induces dreamy sleep, and makes a pastry filling. It was once considered to have as many industrial and medical uses as marijuana.
It is only your misuse of it, which makes it a poison.
Congratulations to the stupid animals that are our military whose only purpose is to shape foreign policy – Henry Kissinger. US in the Opium trade since before the opium wars with such wonderful names of Russel (skull and bones), Delano (tied to the Rosenvelts), Purdue, Astor, Bering, Forbes (neocon and father friends of Soviets), and many others. Of course it was Barbara Honegger who was in a meeting with staff with Reagan that told us this about William Casey -https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b185d796bbaed84c6c0fae2ccb29fb739d7337cc3b39fd9d54b460fb62cc8916.jpg
The world wars were a sham and were meant to kill as many of the German people as possible even after the war Read James Baque’s “Other Losses” as the US Morganthau plan killed nearly 10,000,000 German soldiers after the war. Everything is a hoax. Listen to some reality of Benjamin Freedman at the Willard Hotel in 1961 (the whole speech) as well as JFK’s effort to warn the people of a great conspiracy against all people in his speech in 1961 to the Newspaper Writers. US intelligence, of which Kennedy wanted to dismantle is far more evil than even the Cheka of the NKVD or the Savak of Iran and Mao’s revolutionaries. Destroyed from within and out, the Paneuropeans of Colergi, Habsburg, Warburg and the central bankers wanted Germany to be totally destroyed (Read Nathan Kaufmans’ “Germany Must Perish”). The actions of these monsters goes back 3000 years to the Canaanites which called them a farcical name with little evidence compared to the ready evidence that everyone practically trips over when visiting Egypt and the Middle East. From Carthage to Assyria and from Rome to the Indus Valley, the practice of human sacrifice and cannibalism can be read in Macalister’s Excavation of Gezer vol. 2, the High Place and a way of life that was an abomination throughout the semitic period. Of the original texts of scripture, John 8:44 is very accurate and verified not only by Macalister but his peers. Then there is YHWH’s consort Asherah which was wiped out from history until the 1960s by William Dever which puts the whole story as a ruse as well as never having been in Egypt, Abraham story is Vedic in origin. Rome was the antithisis of the new movement of the church and is just as guilty as the Judeans.
As MIT owns Building 7 and Northwestern owns building 1&2 of the trade towers, ‘higher education’ is complicit in the misinformation of all the teaching. There is not one industry that is honest as they have all been secured by Judeo-masonry of which there are many groups at various levels.
Our warriors in the military are under the same influential spell of subversion that befell Russians, the Anglos in Europe, and the US’s “greatest generation” in the early to mid 20th century. They deserve as much blame as the soldiers who stormed Normandy, which is none. It is the deceptive, gaslighting, degenarate “elites” in control that are responsible, and they are the animals that need to be put down.
I’m not sure about a direct connection to the legal opiate abuse deaths. But an indirect connection through hooked users who switch to vicodins, oxys, or methadone that are legally shipped about by the big pharma concerns seems obvious, sitting just off to the side there a little. Of course, those compounds are known to result in suicidal ideations. Resulting in a solid method for hooking the degenerates, sucking the life out of them and standing by while they kill themselves. Typical cleverness from the YinYang way Tuxedo Cats
And the Lies keep coming. In Fact, Monsanto has developed a new poppy seed that makes the bumper crop even faster. And history showed that the Taliban did not let the farmers grow poppies for opium consumption. Hey Geraldo – ask the Big question – how does the Heroine get to the streeets of America — Taliban camels or do they have c-130s with US flags on their tail feathers?? LOL
The Vatican is laughing all the way to the (its own) bank:
The fourth largest asset class owned by the Vatican is founding industry and controlling stocks in a narrow class of industries related to arms manufacture, military support and pharmacuticals including strategic financial relationships with the international trade of illegal drugs.
Through these strategic investments, the Roman Catholic Church is by far the single largest arms dealer, profiteer from conflict, profiteer from the growth of the pharmaceutical industry as well as single largest recipient of illegal drug money of any organisation in the history of the world.
The rise of the illegal drug trade:
One of the great changes of society over the past forty years has been the campaign of transference and ultimate domination of global pharmaceutical companies in the production of synthetic pain killers compared to traditional plant based opiates.
For thousands of years, communities around the world have grown and harvested their medicine plants alongside their food crops. Hardy and tough plants such as hemp (marijuana) have been relatively easy to grow and have been a source of very cheap, reliable pain killers along with the poppy (morphine) and a host of other naturally grown plants.
However, in the space of a couple of generations, mostly American and some European based consortiums have succeeded in ensuring virtually every nation on Earth has banned the growing, importation and use of naturally grown pain killer crops in preference to the highly expensive, tightly controlled supply of patented pain killers and other drugs.
The global pharmaceutical industry is vast, at around $350 billion in annual sales. North America (US around 50% of total world market), Europe and Japan together accounted for 88 per cent of the worldwide market. Of that, 70% of sales were synthetic pain killers.
The combination of profits from arm sales, investment in pharmaceutical companies and illegal drugs for the Vatican is estimated to be between a staggering $50 Billion to $200 Billion annually.
The Catholic Church depends upon its profits from organized crime (remembering it founded the Mafia in i860, an organization that is headquartered in the Vatican and still meets there annually). For organized crime to make money, the continued global ban on natural pain killers and other naturally processed drugs needs to be maintained.
https://archive.org/stream/TheVaticanAndPharmaceuticalIndustry/TheVaticanAndPharmaceuticalIndustry_djvu.txt
The above figures need to revised up, since the article was written in 2010.
Well, that’s less money the US Congress will have to appropriate for the CIA now!
meanwhile the public is demanding that the government strip down the barriers created to maintain privacy in order to get their tentacles wrapped around the pharmaceutical industry and all of it’s juicy pharmaceutical data for the sake of a “war on Opioids.” A war that will inevitably lead to the government using pharmaceutical data to disarm Americans, while putting a strangle hold on prescription opioids and thereby ushering in a Heroin epidemic the likes of which the country has never seen. Even the alternative media has been suckered into demanding a solution to the opioid crisis. HBO is already rolling out slick documentary with pathos laden footage of young junkie parents nodding off in toy stores as their children scream and cry.
It’s all about stealing resources. Slave trade, drug trade, arms trade has always been how the elite ran things.
Yep, and the production and sale of opiates is how they finance it while disabling and killing the people who can stop them at the same time.
Bonuses for the “D.C. Terrorist” this Christmas, our tax dollars at work. Making money and destroying lives what they do the best.
CIA – a rogue agency, killing Americans for profit, as ordered by the Talmudic Khazarian Mafia.