The poppy problem

"Poppy, for example, is a drought resistant crop. So Afghanistan is in its 10th year of drought and years of war have destroyed the irrigation systems. So farmers will often tell you they don't really have any other crops they can physically grow - and that's a problem."—Gretchen Peters, author of Seeds of Terror: How Heroin is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda

Listen to yesterday's story above or here at npr.org.

Peters has interesting things to say about how heroin finances organized terror groups, the danger cheap, readily available heroin poses to a new influx of American troops, and the "chemical jihad" in which as she reports certain Islamist gangs want to turn western infidels into a nation of addicts.

Listen to Gretchen Peters previous segment here at npr.org where she explains how Afghanistan provides 90 percent of the world's heroin supply.

There is so much that we don't know about this complex situation, including our own government's involvement with opium poppy production over the past decades. Only thing I know, we can't blame the poor innocent plant for the problem.