Taliban heroin and your street

Hemp clothing is fine

It's a bit scratchy.

Hemp makes good rope & sacks, but I'd rather wear cotton.

It's a bit scratchy.

If you wear sackcloth, sure. But a hemp t-shirt feels like any other t-shirt, but lasts much longer. Jeans were originally hemp.

We've never had any cotton farming in the UK, don't have the climate for it. That was Americans & Egyptians. Cotton doesn't really compete with hemp anyway, you wouldn't want your clothes made out of hemp, just like you wouldn't want a strong rope to be made of cotton. Nylon however...

Back in the 60's when I was an avid Caver we had some cotton rope.

It was far more stretchy than the nylon stuff that was just coming into use.

You could bounce on it.

Thinking back now, it was probably near its breaking point

But those things never enter your mind as a young man do they?

And we were the DCRO.

The Taliban actively push the production of heroin.

For a group that most people had never heard of 10 years ago, they really are a wonderful, all-purpose Bogeyman.

Let's not forget it was once the Soviet Evil Empire occupying Afghanistan and the West that was supporting the insurgents.

In 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, said in an interview with a French publication, Le Nouvel Observateur, that the US intervention in the Afghan-Soviet war did not begin in the 1980s, but that, “it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul,” which precipitated the Soviet invasion into Afghanistan. From the Soviet invasion, a bloody ten-year war followed.

 

Amazingly, “Before 1979 Pakistan and Afghanistan exported very little heroin to the West,” but by 1981, “trucks from the Pakistan army’s National Logistics Cell arriving with CIA arms from Karachi often returned loaded with heroin – protected by ISI [Pakistan’s internal security service] papers freeing them from police search.” This change occurred in 1981 when then CIA Director William Casey, Prince Turki bin Faisal of Saudi intelligence and the ISI worked together to create a foreign legion of jihadi Muslims or so-called Arab Afghans. More than 100,000 Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan between 1986 and 1992 in camps overseen by the CIA and [british] MI6. The SAS [british special forces] trained future Al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in bomb-making and other black arts" while their leaders were trained at a CIA camp in Virginia. Further, “CIA aid was funneled through [Pakistani President] General Zia and the ISI in Pakistan.”

 

Creating the Taliban

 

In the mid-1990s, an obscure group of “Pashtun country folk” had become a powerful military and political force in Afghanistan, known as the Taliban. During that same time the Taliban acquired contacts with the ISI, often referred to as Pakistan’s “shadow government.” In 1995, the ISI was actively aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan’s civil war against the warlords that controlled the country. In addition, just as in the Afghan war against the Soviet Union in the previous decade, the ISI looked to Saudi intelligence to provide the funding for the Taliban, and the ties between the ISI and Saudi intelligence grew much closer. The Taliban’s rise to power in Afghanistan was also aided by the CIA, which worked with the Pakistani ISI.

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The law of unintended consequences at work.

If you wear sackcloth, sure. But a hemp t-shirt feels like any other t-shirt, but lasts much longer. Jeans were originally hemp.

Indeed, cloth like fine silk can be made from hemp, as can building materials, strong plastics, clean bio-fue,l medicines for numerous illnesses and disease including cancer

It truly is a wonderful plant.

Why was it banned again?