Poppy for Medicine projects would promote loyalty to the Afghan government and entrench the rule of law in Afghanistan

Poppy for Medicine projects represent a comprehensive, secure, and pragmatic economic development-orientated response to Afghanistan’s opium and security crises. As a counter-narcotics model, Poppy for Medicine projects would entrench the rule of law in Afghanistan, and in doing so, enable the Afghan government to extend its capacity to control the rural parts of the country. As a counter-insurgency model, the integration of the capacities of national and international-level security actors with village control systems in the control and security of Poppy for Medicine projects, would complement and enhance current efforts to counter the insurgency and stabilise Afghanistan.

Illegal opium trade defeated through Poppy for Medicine -triggered development

Village-based Poppy for Medicine projects would enable Afghanistan to defeat the illegal opium trade. Guaranteed to trigger economic development, Poppy for Medicine projects would provide rural farming communities with access to the strategic assets necessary to diversify their economic activities and thus end their reliance on illegal poppy cultivation. Poppy for Medicine projects would not only allow for the controlled, sustainable phasing out of poppy cultivation, they would generate sufficient incentives for farming communities to cut links with drug traffickers. Interdiction and eradication would thereby be brought to a manageable level, by allowing distinctions to be made between the behaviour of those who cultivate poppy as a survival strategy, and the truly criminal behaviour of drug traffickers.

Poppy for Medicine : an anti-corruption counter-narcotics initiative

The Poppy for Medicine project model is designed to respond to the threat of corruption associated with current eradication-based counter-narcotics efforts: integrated local, national and international security resources would be concentrated and targeted during the project phases most vulnerable to corruption. Further, anchored in Afghan villages, Poppy for Medicine projects would operate at the most securable and controllable - and least corrupt - level of Afghan society, where the villages community’s capacity to socially control the behaviour of its inhabitants, combined with the community’s common interest in the economic benefits of the project, would preclude local corruption by project participants.

Countering narcotics by bridging security and development efforts

As a counter-narcotics model, Poppy for Medicine projects would bridge current efforts to bring sustainable security and development in Afghanistan. Immediately generating employment, legal incomes and providing access to strategic economic assets, Poppy for Medicine projects would provide Afghan communities with both a vision of a viable, positive future worth actively rejecting insecurity for, and the means to achieve this future.