100 Afghan drug police killed over last year, official says
Afghan Daily
By Rahim Faiez
ASSOCIATED PRESS
3:38 a.m. March 24, 2008
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/20080324-0338-afghan-drugs.html

Summary:
About 100 police officers were killed last year due to the dangerous regions where poppies are grown. It was said that about 90 percent of the country’s poppies were being grown places where the government could not control. The reason there were so many casualties was because the counter-narcotics police were destroying the plants and were being attacked by the angry farmers of these poppies. The UN said that Afghanistan delivers about 90 percent of the world’s illicit opium which is used in heroin. Around 820 people were arrested in Afghanistan last year for drug trafficking and a 14 percent increase was put onto the previous year’s production of this plant. It was said that last year, there were 13 states in Afghanistan that were poppy-free. The leader of the counter-narcotics police, Gen. Doud Doud, said that he wants to raise this number to 22 this year. Although police are cutting down on the farmers, now people are cultivating marijuana. Doud said the government would get a hold of that as soon as possible too.

A. This article has to do with the AP world theme of, Impact of technology, economics, and demography on people and the environment because the farmers grew the crops on the land and then traded the poppies away for a lot of money.
B. Although there is not much history on this issue, in 2005, the production on the poppies was lagging because of the lack of strong leadership in Afghanistan.
C. The author of this article is Rahim Faiez. He is a male and he sounds like a Muslim who knows a lot about the subject. I don’t know if he lives in Afghanistan but it seems hes pretty familiar with the issue.
D. This article is pretty factually based. The author does not really indicate any bias although the General Doud Doud says some things that could be untrue like how the government is going to clean up the marijuana planting soon.
E. I think we should hear from the point of a farmer growing the crop. This would show us how beneficial this crop is to Afghanistan’s economy. They would also tell us who they were selling it to and why they are selling it for so much if there is a huge surplus of it in the area.
F. I think that the government has to take control of this issue soon or else things will get way out of hand. Like Doud said, he wants to raise the poppy-free states but saying something and doing something are totally different things. If they do finally shut down this production, Afghanistan better find an alternate product or else their economy will suffer severely.