Afghanistan's Opium Nation: Drug Lords, Warlords, and Drug Wars

The Underworld Podcast

True Crime, Documentary, History, Society & Culture

4.7 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 6 September 2021

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For decades, starting a few years even before the Taliban took power the first time around, Afghanistan has dominated the world’s opium and heroin market, in some years producing up to 90% of the global supply. It’s also provided hundreds of millions of all dollars for all sorts of less than desirable entities. Warlords, Druglords, insurgents, rebels, US allies, US enemies and yes, the Taliban. There’s a couple of wild characters who pretty much have been each one of those things at one point or another in their careers. Then there’s the Pakistani and Iranian and Tajik smuggler networks that help get it across borders, the various criminal syndicates in Turkey, the Balkan, Russian, Kurdish and Central Asian traffickers who help get it across more borders all the way to the street crews in London, Scandinavia and everywhere else. All have fed off of the opium poppy planted in Afghanistan. So have the millions of heroin addicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran...and all over Europe, Central Asia, Africa and Russia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Attention. This is a public service announcement from Oakley. It works in tea.
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0:40.3	for all of us.
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0:45.0	If you look at a map of Afghanistan, you'll notice the area in the south, southwest,
0:50.0	where the borders of Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan meet.
0:53.8	This region has been described as one of the most remote and lawless areas in the world.
0:58.5	Unforgiving deserts and rocky outcroppings,
1:01.1	some nearby mountain ranges, it's been home to a smuggler culture for centuries,
1:05.2	with roots honed by the powerful and heavily armed tribes that inhabit the region.
1:10.3	The drug trade has flourished here. Some hash, but mostly opium, later refined into heroin by mobile labs that move around the mountains.
1:18.0	It's provided jobs in a place where those are scarce, money where the people live in hopeless poverty.
1:25.0	The thing about the opium industry is it's at once an incredibly destabilizing, but unfortunately also a stabilizing force.
1:32.0	It's also provided hundreds of millions of dollars for all sorts of less than desirable entities.
1:37.0	Warlords, drug lords, insurgents, rebels, U.S. allies, U.S. enemies, and yes, the Taliban.
	...

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