The US is deploying aggressive—and very public—methods these days in its war on international drugs. It's a sharp contrast to a secret tactic used years ago in Afghanistan that the Washington Post is revealing for the first time. It seems the CIA secretly dropped modified seeds on poppy fields between 2004 and 2015, with the goal of making the resulting heroin less potent. The covert operation, run by the CIA's Crime and Narcotics Center, was so secretive that many senior officials in the Pentagon and State Department were unaware it existed.
And did it work? The best answer seems to be, kind of. "There was a sense that it worked, but maybe over time, it worked less well," one former US official familiar with the program tells the newspaper. It was also expensive to run, a big factor in why it ended—"the juice wasn't worth the squeeze," is how the official puts it. Still, he calls it "an example of creative, out-of-the-box thinking by the agency. … It was dealing with a problem in a non-kinetic, nonmilitary way."
Throughout the broader US-led counter-narcotics campaign, American agencies disagreed on the best strategy, with proposals ranging from aerial herbicide spraying to buying up the Afghan crop for pharmaceutical use. The CIA's secret seed operation took place amid these debates, but official assessments ultimately concluded that no US or allied effort led to lasting reductions in Afghan poppy cultivation or opium production. Read the full story, which notes that the seeds were not believed to have been modified genetically. Instead, they were selectively bred to be less heroin-friendly.
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
