Poppies

Last week I went to the funeral of a Coleshill man who had been killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan a fortnight before his regiment was due to return home. I decided that I would go and attend - out of solidarity. I did not imagine I would be able to get into the Church: I did not even try, but stood instead with about 300 others outside the packed church. There was supposed to be a relay of the service to those outside, but the PA system did not work. Instead we stood talking in low voices beneath our umbrellas in the cold and rain. The people around me were of all ages and all types. It was half-term and so there were quite a lot of youngsters amongst the crowd of people. I ended up standing by and chatting to someone I know who runs discos for a living, but who was there, like me, not because he knew the soldier or his family, but simply because he felt that, as someone who lived in the town, he should be there. The Church itself is set in extensive grounds at the back of the shops which form the High Street and which act as a sound barrier to the passing traffic. It was almost as if we were in the rural world of yesterday. Except that the day's events were very much of today. Finally, the coffin was taken from the Church down to the cemetery by his former comrades in arms. A sergeant amongst the group pall-bearers was clearly having great difficulty preventing himself from crying. It was a moving event. Whilst always being against the war in Iraq, I felt that the war in Afghanistan was justified in international law and also on moral grounds. Al Qaeda had just carried out the attack on the Twin Towers in New York and the Taliban government had fully supported Al Qaeda in what it had done. The Taliban had imposed a repressive regime on its citizens which, morally speaking, as far as I could see was not much different to the infamous Cambodian regime of Pol Pot. And so I hoped, and for a while it appeared, that some semblance of a civilised life could be brought to the country. The terrible excesses of the Taliban's virulent extremism became history. Education for women was restored and people could go about their lives without being arrested by the thought police. As time has gone on, however, things have not gone as well as we might have hoped. Why? Well, it seems to have been the usual combination of an unwillingness to put money and people into the aftermath of the war and the consequent return to power of local gangsters (‘the so-called Warlords') in the now all too familiar power vacuum which followed the defeat of the Taliban. Yet again, the idea of winning the hearts and minds of the populace seems to have been relegated to a distant second, whilst the undermanned armed forces try just to bring ‘security' to the various regions of the country. Why are they so undermanned? Mainly because of that other war - the one in Iraq. That and, it seems, a close-minded approach to doing things. Somewhat ironically, I was wearing a poppy as I stood outside the church. Afghanistan is the world's leading producer of opium (82% of global opium production), cultivating 1,650 square kilometres of opium poppies and a potential 6,100 metric tons of opium in 2006. The policy at the moment is to try to eradicate poppy crops, thus removing a major source of income for the Taliban and Al Qaeda, but also leaving the farmers in remote villages unable to make a reasonable living and so antagonising the community in consequence. An alternative to this has been suggested by the Senlis Council (http://www.senliscouncil.net). Put simply, it is that instead of destroying the poppies, their planting should be done in a controlled way with suitably high price paid to the farmers in order to allow the legal production of the number one pain-killer, morphine. Virtually the whole of the world's production of morphine goes to about 20% of its population - i.e the developed countries. The other 80% of the world largely goes without, despite the fact that they suffer more pain than we do, granted for instance the much later diagnosis of cancer, and therefore its untreatability, and the much higher incidence of Aids in, for instance, Africa. The detailed proposals are on their site and have been referred to in the press on a number of occasions. The American administration, no doubt still smarting from the abolition of prohibition in the 30's, is against it. They list a number of reasons for this, most of which could be overcome granted the will to do so. Perhaps the two reasons given which stood out as being quite insane, however, are as follows: 1. "There is no demand for it". Quotas for the legal production of heroin poppies are set through an international body and are based on previous usage in each country. But the cost of morphine is high and so doctors in developing countries do not prescribe for their patients what they simply could not afford to buy. So there is no demand. Welcome to the world of Kafka! 2. "Pain relief should not be the priority - priority should be given to anti-Aids and anti-cancer drugs". As if preventing or curing illness on the one hand and pain relief on the other are somehow mutually inconsistent! Sometimes I despair of the stupidity of those in charge. Maybe the new American administration will think differently.

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