The narcotics business is changing from an international trade to a local affair

I've never understood why more Americans don't grow their own opium. Opiates are clearly very popular, based on the abuse of prescription opiates and the continuing popularity of street heroin. Unlike virtually all other recreational herbal drugs, it is not illegal to cultivate papaver somniferum. Many an innocent grandmother has lovely poppies growing in her flower bed (and not a few are surprised to find the pods slitted or stolen). It's only illegal to slit the pods and harvest the resin. Just as important, papaver somniferum grows just about anywhere that isn't extremely hot. In most of the temperate US, it will grow on the poorest of soil with little if any irrigation. If converting the crude resin into heroin is too technical for the average user, or even the average dope dealer, anyone can simply smoke the dried resin like people have been doing for thousands of years.

Of all of the components of the illegal drug trade, the smuggling of Afghan opium is surely the least necessary. The explanation I can think of for why American opiate addicts would rather feign back pain to half a dozen different doctors (or to one crooked one) in order to get the right to buy opiate pills, is that they don't know how easy it is to grow their own.

If small cannabis plantations (2/3 plants) were allowed for users above 18 years old, drug mobs would have a big surviving problem....hope that day will come.

The true legend, Bill Hicks once observed: "To make marijuana against the law is like saying that God made a mistake."

We are still suffering this great injustice brought and enforced upon us by The Alcohol Mafia and their profits.

>{LIKE all canny entrepreneurs, drug dealers have a knack for branding their goods with evocative names. Moroccan kif, Nepalese ganja and Bolivian marching powder—such labels add cosmopolitan glamour to a seedy business. }

Now you are giving the drug dealers too much credit. I may be inclined to agree that they provide some things to some needy people, but crediting them with inventing "evocative" names is "smoking a different pipe".

if only the origin of many colloquial terms were so clear. many of the terms are certainly far older than the modern drug dealership business.

One must remember that the number of busts depends largely on police activity. The more busts means more profit, more the property seizures and more violent men are attracted to the illegal trade. Thus the dug war is job security for police, prosecutors, prison guards, etc. Truly a win-win for everyone except taxpayers, who pick up the tab.