"70% of world's Heroin" - Joe Rogan and Evan Hafer share eye-opening insights on role of U.S. in fueling Afghanistan’s opium boom
Evan Hafer and Joe Rogan discussed the role of the United States of America in allowing Afghanistan's opium industry to flourish. The Central Asian country has witnessed political instability and war for nearly half a century.
While the Afghan economy collapsed under the circumstances, opium cultivation allowed forces like the Taliban to survive and flourish. Surprisingly, opium cultivation continued to increase in the country even when it was under US military occupation for nearly two decades.
On the Nov. 15 episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Rogan and Special Forces veteran Hafer discussed how the United States allegedly played a role in Afghanistan becoming the opium capital of the world. Rogan said:
"It sounds so conspiracy theory that no one even wants to touch it. But the [American] troops had to guard the poppy fields. Afghanistan Heroin went way up when we went in there. Their production went way up. There were supplying at one point in time... 70 percent of the world's heroin was coming out of a place that we had occupied."
The United States armed forces left Afghanistan in 2021. Rogan's podcast producer Jamie Vernon pulled up an article that claimed 90 to 95 percent of the world's illicit heroin, an opioid drug made from opium poppy plants, came from Afghanistan around that time.
Rogan exclaimed:
"90 to 95 percent... in 2021... Holy sh**!"
Check out Joe Rogan's comments below (2:41:49):
Evan Hafer tells Joe Rogan that the United States has "dealt with a lot of shady opium dealers"
Evan Hafer claimed that the United States largely diverted the world's attention to the issue of terrorism and allowed opium cultivation to flourish in Afghanistan. Sharing some eye-opening details about the nation's questionable dealings, Hafer added:
"You destabilize the entire country, you deter everyone from actually focusing on the opium, you focus on the terrorism and the Taliban. Then you allow it to flourish. The dirty secret nobody wants to talk about from that perspective is that we, as a country, have dealt with a lot of shady opium dealers.
"Like drug lords that were essentially exporting opium and if they weren't the part of the Taliban and/or if they were anti-Taliban, you do business with them. It's the same story." [2:42:50]
Rogan and Hafer then discussed that Myanmar has replaced Afghanistan as the largest producer of opium since a military coup shook the country a few years ago.
According to a November 2023 article by Al Jazeera, the United Nations reported about a 90 percent reduction in opium farming in Afghanistan over the last couple of years.
The report stated that 233,000 hectares of land were under opium cultivation in Afghanistan by the end of 2022 but the number dropped down to 10,800 hectares towards the end of 2023.