Backround
Known commonly as “The Graveyard of Empires”, Alexander the Great had invaded Afghanistan, The Queen of England had Invaded Afghanistan, The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, alas all inevitably failed. In 2001, the United States added itself to the list of empires to have invaded the mountainous and harsh landscapes of Afghanistan. Afghanistan as a nation, beyond warfare and strife, is also a nation home to one of the largest opium cultivating economies known to the global market today. Based on the analysis of selected variables, it has been concluded that while no direct statistically significant relationship exists between opium production and troop involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, the indirect externalities and correspondents of the two concepts being measured has shown to have an interesting positive trend for this relationship in various ways.
Since October of 2001, the United States has been involved in a brutal war on insurgency, and arguably of attrition between radical fighters seeking governmental control in the Middle Eastern region of Afghanistan. Within that same time frame, the United States, as well as other nations globally, have faced on some sort of scale, a level of opioid addiction and opioid related deaths afflicting the lives of millions within their own population- it seems, a war on two fronts for the United States.
Private Interest
Drugs and war have been a business the United States has had itself entangled in since just after the Second World War. As war became less and less about annexing and liberating/colonizing nations on the grounds for one’s country, they became more and more based on the profit that can be turned by the many corporations supplying the wars- predominantly those corporations associated with our American Military Industrial Complex (MIC). As thousands of young men and women die in service, or to addiction, one thing remains the same. It is companies- Johnson and Johnson, Purdue Pharma, Raytheon, Grumman, Lockheed, Northrup Grumman- that are the ones who are reaping the rewards of the sacrifices these individuals make, not anyone else, and certainly not the preservation of liberty.
For decades, the United States has been battling insurgency in Afghanistan with seemingly no result. Simultaneously, the United States has also been battling opium addiction domestically, also with seemingly no end or solution in sight. The comparison of these two variables using several data sets, can allow for a possible explanation to surface regarding reasoning behind those very same issues. It is only fair to those men and women who are fighting and dying in combat, both in Afghanistan, and to domestic opioid addiction, that they be provided an answer for the death and destruction they have been subjected to for decades.
Stephen Dolan – graduate from James Madison University with a Bachelors of Science in Public Policy and Administration.
