Free Market Fly Kool

Obviously the Company requires some price supports:

UNITED NATIONS — Afghanistan has produced so much opium in recent years that the Taliban are cutting poppy cultivation and stockpiling raw opium in an effort to support prices and preserve a major source of financing for the insurgency, Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the United Nations drug office, says.

Mr. Costa made his remarks to reporters last week as his office prepared to release its latest survey of Afghanistan’s opium crop. Issued Thursday, it showed that poppy cultivation had retreated in much of the country and was now overwhelmingly concentrated in the 7 of 34 provinces where the insurgency remains strong, most of those in the south.

The result was a 19 percent reduction in the amount of land devoted to opium in Afghanistan, the United Nations found, even though the total tonnage of opium produced dropped by just 6 percent.

The high output per acre was attributed to a good growing season in the south, a heavily irrigated area where the Taliban maintain a strong presence in five provinces and have for several years “systematically encouraged” opium cultivation as a way to finance their insurgency, the study said...

...without better economic opportunities, poppy will remain an attractive alternative for many in Afghanistan, the source of more than 90 percent of the world’s opium. Growth has lagged so badly, Mr. Costa noted, that the drug trade still accounts for a third of the Afghan economy. Other estimates put it at as much as one-half...

One of the big disappointments for Bu$hCo-Cheneyburton has been that the progressive movement hasn't gone the way of the antiwar movement of the 1960s.

While many progressives value the work of people like Hunter Thompson, most people realize the man limited himself largely due to substance abuse. Thompson and Leary became puppets of the very system they loathed.

On the other hand (and in the multiverse, there's always another hand), the Righteous Kool requires some pretty heavy endorphins. There's pharmacological dementia, and the kind they sell you on the tube, but they both require to change the landscape in your head. The desire to have a benevolent and powerful Dear Leader is a whole different order of addiction the Empire requires.