A recent Washington Post story on poppy cultivation in Afghanistan suggests three conclusions about banning crops that are used to produce illegal drugs:
1. Subsidizing alternative crops does not materially reduce production of the banned crop. Governments rarely provide sufficiently large subsidies, so most farmers keep growing the banned crop. Even with sufficient subsidies many farmers take the subsidies but then grow the banned crop anyway since enforcement is weak.
2. Crop bans breed corruption.
3. Crop bans generate easy income for precisely the groups the U.S. opposes (the Taliban in Afghanistan, the FARC in Colombia). These groups sell protection services to farmers and drug traffickers. Absent the bans, groups like the Taliban and the FARC would be much poorer.
Rebuilding a country like Afghanistan is hard enough without a ban on the major crop. Farmers there are merely supplying a good demanded by consumers around the world. Policies to reduce that demand, such as non-prohibitory sin taxes, are defensible. Bans on crops like poppy or coca are not.
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