Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law

Background
During the last quarter of the century illicit opium production became increasingly concentrated in two Asian nations, Afghanistan and Burma. During the 1990s the concentration increased still further. In 1999, Afghanistan alone accounted for almost 80 percent of the global total.
In July 2000, the Islamic Taliban regime of Afghanistan announced a ban on opium poppy cultivation. Initially greeted with skepticism, by early 2001 there was considerable evidence that Afghanistan’s opium acreage had declined dramatically, to less than 10 percent of the 2000 figure. Total world opium production plummeted from 4,690 tons in 2000 to only 1,600 tons in 2001, a 65 percent drop.
The ban was kept in place even after the beginning of the American bombing campaign following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. However, by 2002 Afghan production had recovered to mid-1990s levels and in 2004 it reached a level exceeded only by the record 1999 crop. Due to this growth and the parallel, sharp reduction of opium production in Burma, Afghanistan accounted for an astonishing 87 percent of global production in 2004.

Project Aims
Understanding the consequences of the Afghan cutback was the initial motivation of the project underlying this book and it has remained one of its major goals. The ban now appears simply as a footnote in history; there are few notable differences between the world opiate market of 2004 and that of 2000, before the implementation of the ban. However there is potentially a great deal to be learned from analysis of how the market responded to the ban and accompanying reduction in output. For the Taliban accomplished what has been the goal of national and international drug policy agencies for many years, namely a very large, rapid and unanticipated reduction in world opium production.
Besides the ban, the study aims to learn more about the dynamics and patterns of the international market for heroin and other illicit opiates. In particular, we have sought to answer three questions:
(1) What are the patterns of consumption, trafficking and earnings of illicit opiates across nations?
(2) How did the cutback affect the flow of illicit opiates throughout the world market?
(3) Are there any prospects for interventions aimed at production and trafficking that can reduce (global, national or regional) consumption of heroin and other opiates?

Project Methods
To provide even rough answers to the above-mentioned questions required collection of data beyond the very small amount currently available, principally from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). We recruited collaborators in eight nations that are important to understanding the global production and trafficking of opium and its derivatives: China, Colombia, India, Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Thailand and Turkey.
Despite difficulties in the primary data collection, the collaborators’ reports provided useful quantitative and qualitative data about some important aspects of the world opiate market. These permitted a tighter description of the response to the 2001 cutback. Furthermore, by comparing the collaborators’ findings and triangulating them with information drawn from other sources and our previous studies, we were able to start a much needed, systematic analysis of the world opiate market.
In addition to these qualitative analyses we developed a “flow model” of the world opiate market. One purpose of this model is to track the pattern of opiate flows across countries. It is impossible to analyze the behavior of the market without a benchmark quantitative description. The flow model, implemented first with data for the years 1996-2000 (the period preceding the effective ban), and second with data for 2001-2003 (the period including and immediately following the ban), imposes consistency on estimates of production, seizures and consumption and enables quantitative comparisons of the pre- and post-ban periods. It also facilitates estimation of the opiate trade’s contributions to Gross Domestic Product.

Project Status
The study is now in its final stages and the three principal investigators expect to send the final book manuscript to the publisher in early 2006. Several articles will also be published in peer-reviewed journals.

Project Funding
The project is an international collaborative effort of the Drug Policy Research Center at the RAND Corporation in the United States and the MPI. The project was funded by the European Commission, the Netherlands Ministry of Justice, the United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office and a U.S. private foundation.