Why is Pakistan a source of illicit drugs?
Two relevant plants were widely cultivated in Pakistan. One of these was cannabis, which grew both cultivated and wild. Indeed, there was quite a bit growing in the vicinity of my office in Islamabad, Pakistan s capital city. Some people grew rich on cannabis: the huge palace of Haji Ayub Afridi on the section of the Grand Trunk Road leading from Peshawar to the Khyber Pass was reputed to be built on cannabis money. The significant illicit crop in Pakistan was opium poppy, the source of heroin. This was the focus of my work in Pakistan. Poppy has been grown in Pakistan for centuries, if not millennia. It took off as a commercial crop in the 1980s. In my first weeks in the UN I went to see poppy-growing areas. All these were and I suppose still are in Pakistan s North West Frontier Province, which adjoins Afghanistan. North West Frontier Province included a patchwork of tribal territories with a peculiar legal status, as the national laws did not automatically apply there, even nominall
