The Taliban Vowed to End Afghanistan's Heroin Trade. What Happened Next?

Just days after retaking control of Afghanistan last August, Taliban leaders vowed they would eradicate opium cultivation, prompting mixed feelings in the West. 

Even though the Taliban successfully eradicated poppy cultivation in 2000 and 2001 during their last period in power, some observers expressed doubt that the new regime would stifle an industry that’s so lucrative. 

Others were cautiously optimistic, suggesting that a Taliban clampdown on opium, in a country that produces 85 percent of the world’s heroin, could reduce global addiction. 

There were also fears that the strangulation of the flow of heroin out from Afghanistan could lead to traffickers in Europe, Asia and Africa replacing it with deadly fentanyl, sparking a North American-style overdose crisis, on a global level.

But now, a year later, and four months after the Taliban officially decreed a ban on the cultivation of poppy and the production, use or transportation of all other narcotics, what impact has the regime’s drug policies had – if any – on the global supply of heroin? The simple answer is: for now, none – although whether this is a bad thing, and how long it will stay that way, hangs in the balance.  

Drug market experts have told VICE World News that in Europe, a major destination for heroin from Afghanistan, there is no evidence of any shortages, droughts, drop in purity or change in wholesale kilo price of the drug in the last year. 

Yet this could all change next year.

So far the evidence on the ground in Afghanistan has found that the Taliban’s poppy ban has been more words than action. Part of this is due to the timing of the poppy harvests. By the time the ban was announced, in April, farmers had already began extracting opium from poppies in the south of the country. By announcing a ban in April, when most poppy harvests were either underway or already being processed into opium and on sale in the bazaars, the Taliban, possibly intentionally, opted to shut the door after the horse had bolted. 

When VICE World News visited the country’s southern, poppy-rich provinces of Helmand and Kandahar at the end of April, three weeks after the ban, it found the opium business was largely booming, in some cases with the full involvement of Taliban officials. 

Since then, reports have surfaced indicating that the poppy ban is being enforced with more vigour. Tractors overseen by Taliban fighters have been filmed tearing up poppy fields, although there are suspicions it was more of a PR stunt than a concerted effort to destroy poppy. 

David Mansfield, an Afghanistan analyst specialising in the country’s illicit economy and author of A State Built on Sand: How Opium Undermined Afghanistan, said Taliban leaders appeared to have made the decision not to go all-out to destroy this year’s crop for risk of inflaming farmers already coping with food drought and economic crisis in the regime’s rural heartlands.

“For the Taliban to enforce a ban immediately after announcing it would have been unwise and potentially provoked widespread resistance. Farmers were already heavily invested in their crops. Having dedicated considerable time in planting, thinning and weeding, the crop was just about to yield, and with so many farmers having grown, any attempt at widespread eradication would have provoked a backlash for a new government that had relied on the rural population for support during its time as an insurgency. Instead the Taliban gave farmers a bye,” said Mansfield.  

“This years opium harvest has been unaffected by the Taliban’s announcement of a ban. Reports from the southwest - where the bulk of the country’s opium is grown - suggest a sizeable crop harvested and traded across the numerous bazaars in the area, then transported to labs for processing and onward shipment across Afghanistan’s borders.” 

What’s unclear, said Mansfield, is what happens next and whether the Taliban will act to deter planting of the next crop, due to go into the ground between late October and late December this year.

Mansfield said that the first indication of how serious the Taliban will enforce its drugs ban could come with this season’s wild crop of ephedra, the plant used to make Afghanistan’s other money-spinning drug, methamphetamine. If the Taliban prevent its harvesting in the coming months, it could spell trouble for next year’s poppy crops.

There are already signs the Taliban’s anti-drugs edict has impacted the meth market. Prices of ephedra and meth have rocketed and, according to satellite imagery collected by Mansfield’s research team, bazaars that were usually well-stocked with ephedra and meth were empty. Mansfield said Afghanistan’s meth market is “clearly concerned about future supply”.   

Perhaps in anticipation of shortages of poppy for the coming season, opium and heroin prices are also much higher than normal in Afghanistan, with evidence of traders stockpiling the drugs because of the ban.

“If the Taliban take action against the ephedra crop and the meth industry, it could lead to reverberations across the much larger opium economy, creating uncertainty as farmers approach the coming opium planting season,” said Mansfield. “If this was combined with more active efforts by the local authorities, it could deter many farmers from planting [poppies]. Awash with last year’s crop, and at inflated prices, they could be exhorted, through threats and promises of future aid, to hang fire and not plant an opium crop in the fall.” 

But none of this fear or nervousness within Afghanistan’s drug markets has yet rippled along the supply lines, such as the main “Balkan route,” which sees heroin trafficked from Afghanistan through Pakistan and Iran, through Turkey and into the Balkans and Europe.  

But will the Taliban even stick to their own ban? In 2021, the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that Afghanistan’s heroin economy was worth between £1.5 billion and £2.2 billion, and provided up to 14 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. Even though the Taliban make far more money from taxing legal goods such as cigarettes and fuel passing over Afghanistan’s borders, and have increased coal exports with the help of child labour, observers doubt that the regime, particularly at a time of economic crisis, will sacrifice such a rich source of cash. 

“For many Afghans, food security, children’s education, and meeting everyday costs would be impossible without the poppy,” Shehryar Fazli, a consultant for the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime, outlined in a briefing last month. Fazli said it’s widely presumed the Taliban announced the ban not for religious reasons but to attract foreign aid and international respect.  

“Some prominent experts and commentators infer that international legitimacy or favour was the Taliban’s primary motivation. There are no signs yet, however, that the move will generate such a response. The Taliban’s record on women’s rights and other human and civil rights has so far dictated the level of Western engagement with Kabul. How willing and able the Taliban is to enforce its edict, in the absence of international support, may remain unclear for several months.”

If the Taliban do stick to their word and eradicate the poppy trade in the midst of an economic crisis, said Mansfield, “many land-poor farmers will find themselves impoverished under this scenario”, and could end up as refugees.

“Unlike previous bans, farmers would not be able to pursue the coping strategies of the past, such as joining the army, police or find a job in a city. Many would have little choice [but] to join the throngs of people trying to leave the country and make their way to Iran, Turkey and possibly on to Europe,” said Mansfield.

The nightmare scenario is that, buoyed by income from other sources and far less reliant on heroin than the West presumes, the Taliban clamps down on poppy cultivation to such an extreme extent during its second year of rule that it opens the door for the arrival of fentanyl onto the global drug menu. It’s likely that the only thing stopping Europe, Asia and Africa’s heroin suppliers from putting much cheaper but far deadlier fentanyl into the mix is the abundant supply of the real thing from the fields of Afghanistan. 

The long-term eradication of the country’s heroin-producing industry may sound like success to Taliban leaders, law enforcement agencies and governments around the world, but in reality it could spark a worldwide opioid overdose crisis that makes North America’s look small-scale.