Afghan and coalition troops have seized and destroyed forty tons of Hashish while dismantling a drug producing facility in Afghanistan. The drugs were found during the raid in Spin Boldak district of Kandahar province, on the border with Pakistan, said Monday Lt. Cmdr. Walter Matthews, a US military spokesman. Abdul Raziq, Pakistani police commander said the drugs were found in the basement of a compound in Nawa Kili village. Authorities valued the drug haul at around $400 million.
That's pretty significant money. Lemme see, here... (carry the 4, divide by the square root of 79, divide by 6...) That's $10 million a ton, or maybe $10 million per 2000 pounds... (carry the 3, divide by the square root of 23, divide by 51...)... That makes $5000 a pound, or $312.50 an ounce, presumably wholesale, at the source. That's not a market I keep up with, but it does sounds a little high, doesn't it?
At the time of the fall of the Taliban regime, Afghan drug production accounted for 11 percent of world production. A recent study carried out by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reveals that more than half of the country's farms now grow cannabis.
| Cannabis produced in Afghanistan supplies at least 90 percent of the world heroin stock. |
Cannabis produced in Afghanistan supplies at least 90 percent of the world heroin stock.
That sounds resonable. It's nonsense, but it sounds reasonable.
Since the US-led invasion of the country in 2001, the heroin trade has swollen in value to an estimated $4 billion per year and employs over 1 in 10 Afghans.