The Heroin Crisis: Few Are Connecting The Dots To Afghanistan—The Taliban ENDED The Trade in Heroin - The US Invasion Brought It Back.

Heroin seized in Helmand province, Afghanistan July 17, 2010. (Photo by isafmedia)

By Peter Weber
This death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman on Sunday was, above all, a personal loss for his family and friends and — as Scott Meslow and many others have noted — a huge artistic loss for the U.S. and the world. It is also a cautionary tale about the dangers of heroin. As if we needed another one...

So why is heroin so relatively cheap? First, there's a lot of supply these days, thanks largely to an increase in opium poppy production in Afghanistan. Opium — from which heroin is derived — is grown in Southeast Asia (mainly Burma) and pockets of Central Europe and South America. Mexico is an increasingly large producer and exporter. But Afghanistan is by far the world's dominant supplier, as this map from ChartsBin shows:

via chartsbin.com

And Afghanistan grew a record number of poppies in 2013, with opium production up an eye-popping 49 percent over 2012, Pentagon officials testified before a Senate committee in mid-January. Afghanistan's 5,500 tons of opium was about 90 percent of the world's supply last year. Not much of that opium makes it into the U.S. as heroin — only 4 percent of U.S. heroin came from Afghanistan last year, according to the DEA — but in a global market, a glut of product drives down prices. (Mexican heroin would probably cost more if Europe weren't being flooded with Afghan drugs, for example.)

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