Out this month:
From the world’s foremost expert on the geopolitics of the opium trade comes a book that provides the clearest and most up-to-date explanation of why illicit opium production emerges in certain regions and, crucially, why decades of aggressive anti-drug efforts on the part of the United States and United Nations have resulted in a total failure to suppress or even reduce the illicit growing of poppies. In Opium: Uncovering the Politics of the Poppy, Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy offers a precise history of the opium trade, following it from China to Southeast Asia, through the Burmese “Golden Triangle” and on to Afghanistan, which currently produces an astounding 93% of the world’s opium, with no signs of slowing. Along the way, he exposes the futility of a “war on drugs” by showing that there is a symbiotic relationship between war economies and drug economies—why a trade that thrives on the poverty and underdevelopment created by violent conflict can never be defeated militarily. In this sense, drug war logic is, he argues, almost exactly backwards.
Chouvy’s book, the result of years of careful research on the ground in opium-producing regions, should be read by anyone with an interest in finding out the real causes of the thriving trade in illicit opium. This includes policymakers, journalists, and the ordinary citizen who prefers a rational approach to drug policy, one that focuses on the root causes of poppy cultivation and the motivations of impoverished farmers who often find themselves victims twice-over—“forced by acute poverty to resort to illicit agricultural drug production,” Chouvy says, they “find they must then endure the violence induced by the War on Drugs.” Bolstered with detailed maps of trafficking routes, created by the author himself, and a postscript that addresses clear-headedly the most recent developments in Afghanistan, Opium is the most serious treatment to date of the complex politics behind the opium trade, one that must be taken into account if the United States, during its present entanglement in the world’s foremost opium-producing region, wishes to avoid the destructive mistakes of the past.
Check out Chouvy’s detailed website for articles, maps, photos and more on the global opium trade.