Afghan heroin policy is the term John Kiriakou uses for the post-2001 U.S. arrangement in Afghanistan under which heroin-poppy cultivation was, per Kiriakou’s first-person 2009 investigation for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, protected and actively encouraged by U.S. military and CIA personnel.[1][2]
The arithmetic
Per Kiriakou: “The Taliban banned the cultivation of heroin poppy. So in 2000, Afghanistan accounted for 0% of the world’s heroin.” By 2009, when Kiriakou flew to Kandahar and Lashkar Gah as senior investigator for Senator John Kerry’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Afghanistan was producing “93% of the world’s heroin.”[3][4]
The poppy farmer in Lashkar Gah
Through a State Department friend running the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Lashkar Gah, Kiriakou pulled rank on a reluctant U.S. military escort to be driven into the poppy fields. He asked a farmer — through a Pashtu translator — why he was growing poppy rather than vegetables that could be harvested twice a year and exported. The farmer’s answer, per Kiriakou: “The Americans told me in 2001 that if I told them where the Arabs were, I could grow all the poppy I wanted.” Kiriakou: “What American told you you could grow poppy?” At that, the U.S. security officer escorting Kiriakou said “meeting over” and physically pulled him back to the jeep.[5][6][7][8]
The DEA explanation
Before filing the paper, Kiriakou ran it past a senior DEA officer friend at a secret DEA facility in rural Virginia. The friend’s read: “Buddy, you know you’re never going to get this published, right? Afghanistan produces 93% of the world’s heroin. All of that heroin goes to Iran and Russia, and we want them to be addicted to heroin. It weakens their societies. It weakens their cultures. It makes them easier to beat if we have to fight them.”[9][2]
U.S. domestic heroin, per Kiriakou, comes from Latin America via Mexico — “it’s just too hard to get it from Afghanistan all the way to the United States when it can just come right up through Mexico.”[10]
The Kerry shutdown
John Kerry’s response on receiving the paper, per Kiriakou: “You know, on second thought, I don’t think it really does any good for us to publish this paper. It’s just it’s angry and it points the finger and I think we should probably just kill it.”[10]
The fentanyl parallel
Kiriakou’s analogous reading of Chinese fentanyl flowing into the United States: “Why won’t the Chinese stop the flow of fentanyl to the United States? I’ll give you one guess. Because it weakens our society and it makes us easier to beat if we have to fight them in a war.”[11]