The UN says the correlation between insecurity and opium cultivation has been apparent for several years.
Opium production in Afghanistan has fallen by a third, according to a United Nations report.
Efforts by aid agencies and the UN to stymie opium production seem to have been counter-productive.
In October 2009 a UN report said Afghanistan's illegal opium production had devastating global consequences.
"Illegal logging in Cambodia is like opium trading in the Golden Triangle, " says Environment Minister Mok Mareth.
This year, however, poppy cultivation and opium production in Afghanistan appears to have decreased sharply .
This, despite efforts on the part of the United States to sharply limit opium production in the country.
FORBES: When The U.S. Cracks Down On Afghan Heroin, It Aids The Taliban
Three-quarters of global opium production is in Afghanistan, with Myanmar and Mexico making up most of the balance.
British and US counter-narcotics official argue, though, that there was never any chance of a quick replacement for opium.
The Laotian government long tolerated opium cultivation, in the absence of alternative livelihoods.
Nangarhar, which Mr Qadir governed in the mid-1990s, is one of Afghanistan's most important areas for the cultivation of opium-producing poppies.
The UN said last week that opium-poppy production has begun to rise again in Myanmar after six years of sharp declines.
Last year, an estimated four hundred thousand acres of opium poppies were planted in Afghanistan, a fifty-nine-per-cent increase over the previous year.
Mr Arlacchi, who made his name fighting the Mafia in Italy, wants to eliminate the cultivation of coca and opium poppies by 2008.
ECONOMIST: The United Nations solemnly enters the war on drugs
The UN ran out of patience this year with the opium growers in northwest Pakistan, freezing aid until they agreed to destroy their crops.
The international community accepts that farmers are only likely to stop cultivating opium if they can see the benefits to them of doing so.
Instead, America would target the traffickers who back the Taliban, and then lure the impoverished Afghan opium farmers to the American side with alternative crops.
Majid says the drop is because he, like the U.S.-funded team that works with him, travels from district to district to convey the anti-opium message in person.
The opium-free poppy seed is the result of five years of research by scientists at the government-run Central Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants based in Lucknow.
Last year he also called on the UK government to licence the opium poppy trade in Afghanistan, to help combat a world shortage in the pain-killing drug morphine.
Sligo got so excited after following to Mount Parnassus and its oracle the opium-loving Lord Byron that he started building his own temple of dreams in these wilds in 1815.
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There were also crucial questions over how many UK troops should be on the ground, how to tackle the opium trade, and how to engage with neighbouring states, he added.
Unlike Afghanistan, which has opium (and Iraq which has oil), the Horn has little of economic value to fuel a war: its frontline, after all, can barely keep a cow alive.
In February 1785 The Times listed opium from Smyrna (now Izmir) between oil from Leghorn (Livorno) and peas from Dantzic (Gdansk) in its roundup of goods unloaded at the port of London.
Until recently, drug addiction in Vietnam was usually associated with ethnic minorities in the highlands, who have been traditional smokers of opium and have long cultivated it as an important cash crop.
The same turns out to be true for the total demand for Afghani opium, according to a new research paper from economist Jeffrey Clemens of the University of California at San Diego.
FORBES: When The U.S. Cracks Down On Afghan Heroin, It Aids The Taliban
Corruption is rife within all Afghan government organs, and central authority is barely felt in the lawless south and south-west, where opium production rose several hundred percent in provinces such as Farah this year.
UNODC, opium is making a return there too.
ECONOMIST: New figures show Afghanistan's opium output is rising fast
The industrial and French revolutions, which produced anxiety on a vast scale, saw De Quincey on opium, Coleridge on laudanum and Davy, in his chemical laboratory, giggling and whooping helplessly as he sniffed nitrous oxide gas.
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