Afghanistan just had a record poppy harvest — expect more heroin on street near you

Afghanistan is on track for a record-breaking year of heroin production, according to the U.S. and Afghan officials, and addictions workers expect a flood of cheap drugs to end up on a street corner near you.

The war-torn country’s opium production is expected to exceed 10,000 tonnes this year, more than double last year’s harvest, Afghanistan’s counter-narcotics minister, Salamt Azimi, told Pashto language media this month.

Opium is the raw ingredient for heroin, and Afghanistan is the world’s largest supplier of the commodity, helping to fuel what healthcare workers call an “opioid epidemic” on the streets of North America.

A record poppy harvest in Afghanistan means heroin and its derivatives are likely to be cheaper due to the law of supply and demand, said Seth Fletcher from the Canadian Centre for Addictions who has worked on the frontlines of the opioid crisis for 15 years.

“There are a lot of geopolitical reasons why production is increasing in Afghanistan (and) when production is saturated, the price goes down,” Fletcher told VICE News.

“Vancouver, being a point of entry from Asian markets, is going to see the effects, and that trickles across the country… All of these factors seem to be coming to a head at the exact same time,” he said, leading to an “explosion in opioid addictions.”

The opioid crisis has gotten “worse and worse” over the past two decades, said Fletcher who works with drug users.

While there isn’t a clear, causal relationship between decreased heroin prices and increased addiction levels in North America, lower prices for heroin are likely to entice people who use other more expensive opioids, like oxycontin, to switch to heroin, Fletcher said.

“People often transition to heroin because of the price and the market being flooded,” Fletcher said. “People are just trying to find a cheaper substitute for what they are used to using.” It’s unclear how increased opium production will impact the fentanyl epidemic which is thought to have claimed thousands of lives in North America although exact statistics are not available. Fentanyl is cheaper than heroin and much of the heroin on the streets is cut with the cheaper drug.

Afghanistan supplies the raw ingredients for about 90 percent of the heroin in Canada and 85 percent in the U.K., according to data from the U.S. State Department cited by the New York Times this week.

The amount of Afghan land dedicated to poppy production jumped 64 percent this year to 340,000 hectares, an area larger than the U.S. State of Rhode Island, said Azimi, the country’s drug czar. Afghan and U.S. counter-insurgency operations have largely failed to eradicate the crop, which they say helps to finance the Taliban and other armed groups.

The Taliban denies involvement in the drug trade. A spokesman for the group, Zabihullah Mujahid, told the New York Times they “had nothing to do” with processing heroin, and denied that major laboratories for refining poppies into heroin or other derivatives existed in the areas under its control.

Since first invading Afghanistan in 2001 following the 9-11 attacks, the U.S.-led coalition has been unable to seriously reduce poppy cultivation in the country. Analysts say this is due a series of factors including: a lack of Afghan government control over large swaths of territory, a desire not to destroy the livelihoods of small farmers who grow the crop in order to “win hearts and minds,” and the general failure of drug eradication efforts, as evidenced in Colombia, Bolivia and other parts of Latin America.

Opium accounted for about 16 percent of Afghanistan’s Gross Domestic Product or about $3 billion in 2016, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime or double what it was worth in 2015.