PRESS RELEASE
Soros Pal Malloch-Brown Says Legalize Afghan Opium
Sept. 5, 2008 (EIRNS)—The following press release was issued today by the French newspaper Nouvelle Solidarité.
Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, the George Soros intimate who is today Britain's Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office with responsibility for Africa, Asia and the U.N., back on June 6, 2007 published an article in Spiegel Online, titled: "NATO To Legalize Afghanistan Opium?" The author, observing the stalemate in plans to reduce opium production, wrote that "a change of strategy may be on the horizon. Governments in Berlin, Paris and Rome, along with NATO leadership, are discussing a potentially explosive new idea: the legalization of Afghanistan's opium production. The plan envisages farmers being able to sell their poppies to officially licensed buyers for the same price they currently get from the drug barons. The product could then be sold to the pharmaceutical industry for pain medication and other products. 'We are not bringing drug cultivation under control with the concepts we have had up to now,' a NATO general responsible for Afghanistan told Spiegel."
Some months later, on Nov. 10, 2007, the Guardian elaborated on "the U.K.'s new plan: pay farmers to ditch opium," and wrote that "Senior British officers believe the Afghan war remains largely misunderstood in Britain, and say security is the precondition for building alternatives to opium production. Lord Malloch-Brown recently returned from Afghanistan to tell peers: 'The Department of International Development is looking at whether we can put on a more formal and structured long-term basis what one would controversially describe as an Afghan equivalent of a CAP [the EU Common Agriculture Policy—ed.], with subsidized purchase of legal crops to make returns more like those from poppy.'... He pointedly added that only the U.S. favored aerial spraying of opium crops," wrote the Guardian. Malloch-Brown reportedly got strong backing from Prime Minister Gordon Brown and former Foreign Office Permanent Secretary Lord Jay, who "became so despairing of the fight, that he now is backing calls for opium to be produced legally and used as medical morphine, but the idea appears to have been rejected."
Underscoring the British role in Afghan opium strategies, is that Baron Malloch-Brown is an intimate friend of pro-drug legalization billionaire, and fellow Briton George Soros. Malloch-Brown is the acting vice-president of Soros' pro-drug Open Society Institute, and Soros' Quantum Fund, based in the Netherlands Antilles, a notorious drug-money laundering platform.
