The Senlis Council, a France-based group, released results of a study examining the potential for licensing poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, which produces an estimated 87 percent of the world’s supply of both opium and its derivative, heroin.

The study argues for “licensed opium production in Afghanistan to provide essential medicine,” said the group’s executive director, Emmanuel Reinert, in advance of its release.

Transforming some illegal poppy fields into legal ones could “address both the drug policy crisis in Afghanistan and the pain crisis in developing countries,” which Reinert said need opium-based painkillers to treat patients with cancer, AIDS and other diseases.

In fact, GlaxoSmithKline make a sizable chunk of their opium-derivative profits from crops purchased from farmers in the New Zealand-Tasmania-Australia chunk of Oceania.

But the Afghanistan representative of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Doris Buddenberg, called the idea a “pipe dream” whose time had not come.

Buddenberg said Afghan farmers would probably reject offers of legal world prices for their crops. She also said the lack of supply was not the main reason for the low consumption of opium-based medicine in developing countries.

Afghanistan’s booming drug trade is suspected of partly funding its insurgency and has brought warnings that the country is becoming a “narco-state” less than four years after a U.S.-led invasion drove the Taliban from power.

This UN expert thinks Afghan farmers would refuse world market price. The druglords pay them a couple grand for their crops. NZ, Tas & Oz poppy farmers are making $35-50K/year.