Afghanistan's Helmand province, heartland of Taliban guerrillas fighting NATO forces, is about to become the world's largest drug supplier, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

Helmand, a province in the south of Afghanistan, cultivated more drugs than entire countries such as Myanmar, Morocco or even Colombia, the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC) said in its 2007 World Drug Report.

"Helmand province, severely threatened by insurgency, is becoming the world's biggest drug supplier. In Afghanistan, opium is a security issue more than a drug issue," UNODC Director Antonio Marias Costa said in the report's preface.

"Curing Helmand of its drug and insurgency cancer will rid the world of the most dangerous source of its most dangerous narcotic, and go a long way to bringing security to the region."

While the amount of land under illicit poppy cultivation fell by 10 percent globally between 2000 and 2006, global opium production soared by 43 percent to a record high of 6,610 tonnes in 2006 from a year earlier.

This was due to a shift in output from inferior Southeast Asian fields to more productive ones in Afghanistan -- which in 2006 produced 92 percent of all opium in the world.

Other worrying signs came from Africa, suggesting the impoverished continent could find itself at the crossroads of international drug crime.

AFRICA "UNDER ATTACK"

"There are warning signs that Africa is also under attack, targeted by cocaine traffickers from the west -- Colombia -- and heroin smugglers in the east -- Afghanistan," the report said.

"This threat needs to be addressed quickly to stamp out drug-related crime, money-laundering and corruption, and to prevent the spread of drug use that could cause havoc across a continent already plagued by other tragedies."

The cultivation, production and abuse of almost every kind of drug around the world -- cocaine, heroin, cannabis and amphetamine-type stimulants -- had stabilised overall.

"Progress made in some areas is often offset by negative trends elsewhere," wrote Costa. "But overall, we seem to have reached a point where the world drug situation has stabilised and been brought under control."

With some 160 million annual customers, cannabis provides the largest illicit drug market by far. According to U.N. estimates, global cannabis herb production eased by some 6 percent to 42,000 tonnes in 2005 from a year earlier.

"For the first time in years, we do not see an upward trend in the global production and consumption of cannabis," Costa said.

Cocaine production has remained largely stable over the past few years. It was estimated at 984 tonnes in 2006 amid signs of a drop in cultivation in Andean countries, especially Colombia.

Global output of amphetamine-style stimulants was estimated to have nudged down by 2 percent to 478 tonnes in 2005.

Yahoo News

Editorial Comment: No surprises when we see this story...

Cast your minds back to a simple news story from the start of the year... of a British Colonel who was amazed at the orders he recieved from command, to NOT intercept drugs convoys even if they had the stuff falling out of the back and he bucked at these orders and the overall control of command was given to the US.

Ask yourself this, as the Colonel did?  If the forces are there to stop the drugs trade, why was it ordered to let the convoys through?

Well, lets take a look back to Vietnam, to what the US government did then.

Many associates of the President's father and Dick Cheney were involved in controlling the heroin trade in Vietnam and surrounding provinces in the prelude to and the duration of the Vietnam conflct, much has been written elsewhere on the Golden Triangle and Iran-Conta but this is not the first time that the US government and drugs have gone hand in hand wherever they seed conflict.

And now suddenly Africa has this problem and it appears at the exact same time as that of forced US intervention on the continent.

No surprise if you think about it.

America it seems is a land of lies, America preaches to other nations about their behaviour and yet tortures, maims and massacres people with impunity, 40 years ago America in some parts was more apartheid than South Africa, Bush rattles on about countries like Russia about their "democratic" reforms but President Carter has stated that at least one of the Bush elections was tremendously corrupt and riddled with voter fraud and disenfranchisement.

I won't even dwell on the fact that facets of America have more in common with Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia than the so-called land of freedoms...

Drugs is huge, huge as in multi billions of dollars in tax free cash...

Do some research on things like the "Golden Triangle", "Golden Crescent", "Iran-Contra", then follow the links also to such as El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, also of interest could be the fact that the Bush family are buying huge swathes of south America.

You could go further back to studies by the CIA who looked into controlling nations through such things as drugs, promiscuity, chemical warfare and it seems to pan out fairly on the ball that one of their studies has hit home.

None of this is coincidence, you just need to sew it all together to make the bigger picture.

---