https://youtu.be/7DitAWxzy6I
BBC: Afghanistan the unknown country

https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/trends/current-affairs-trends/narco-state-in-afghanistan-taliban-opium-trade-to-fund-power-grab-insurgency-7334791.html

In 2018, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that the country’s “opiate economy is worth between 6 and 11 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP and it exceeded the value of the country’s officially recorded licit exports of goods and services.”

The sad truth is there’s no supply-side answer to this problem: from Mexico to Colombia, the world has learnt that efforts to end narcotics production are, at best, a Sisyphean project. The blossoming of this empire of poppies will be among the most toxic legacies of the world’s failure to build a viable, modern Afghan state.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/589673

Abstract

Recent estimates suggest that in 2007, Afghan opiate production accounted for about 93 percent of the world’s total. This article presents a framework for estimating the potential for source country drug control policies to reduce this production. It contains a first pass at estimating the potential for policy to shift the supply of opium upward, as well as a range of supply and demand elasticities. The estimates suggest that meager reductions in production can be expected through alternative development programs alone (reductions are less than 6.5 percent in all but one of the specifications presented). They also suggest that substantial increases in crop eradication would be needed to achieve even moderate reductions in production (reductions range from 3.0 percent to 19.4 percent for various specifications). The results also imply that, all else being equal, the cessation of crop eradication would result in only modest increases in opiate production (with estimates ranging from 1.6 percent to 9.6 percent).