Photos from the Afghanistan Drug War

Aaron Huey takes gorgeous photos for National Geographic Adventure, the New Yorker, Smishsonian, and the New York Times. He recently hitchiked across Siberia on a National Geographic Expedition Council Grant. Huey's site is filled with stunning images, including a photo essay documenting the Afghanistan drug war (see above). Aaron Huey

• [CopsSayLegalizeDrugs]

  Unless and until we legalize and regulate drugs, all the profits will continue to fund cartels and terrorists while we spend countless public resources on futile enforcement and incarceration.

  That’s why more and more cops who fought on the front lines of the “drug war” are starting to speak out on the need to stop the madness. Check it out at http://www.CopsSayLegalizeDrugs.com

• [Anonymous]

  Could someone please explain why we don’t set up some sort program whereby we purchase all of their opium for medicinal purposes, offering them a good deal more than they would get by processing it themselves into dicetyl morphine?
  I agree that drugs should be legalized, but for now…
  I’d guess that that would be much cheaper than fighting the losing battle of trying to eradicate fields etc…

• [snow white]

  I wanted to share the link to this excellent site on Facebook but was told:
  “WARNING: This Message Contains Blocked Content
  Some content in this message has been reported as abusive by Facebook users.”
  So I tried just ‘aaronhuey.com’ but that wasn’t allowed either. Managed it by spelling it ‘aaronhuey[dot]com’ and putting it in my ‘status’ box. Perhaps Facebook is not the right place for me?!

• [Takuan]

  now they claim they will stop killing and starving impoverished farmers (who were forced into poppy growing by foreign Taleban and foreign oil pipeline interests) and concentrate on blowing up drug labs instead. This is a lie , of course.

• [David]

  Man, what a beautiful collection of photos!

  I spent the last hour browsing through his galleries. Now I’m late for class.

• [wolfiesma]

  I dare you to dress up like that for Halloween.

• [wolfiesma]

  Cops say legalize drugs @6,
  That is a fascinating and important website. I hope the political climate will finally be conducive to revamping this destructive “War on Drugs.”

• [JoeS]

  Afghanistan was described in Kipling’s time as a country full of wild dogs and wilder tribesmen. It is an insurgent’s paradise, full of warring factions and little or no rule of law. The rural populace is disperced and the terrain is rugged, making maneuvers difficult for armies dependent on supply lines. Maybe the ideal place to test neutron bombs’ effectiveness in wiping out vermin hiding in caves. If you want to bring them to terms, from a strategic perspective, you’d probably do best by wiping out a hundred square miles to show you mean business, and then start negotiations. Nasty business, this war stuff!

• [Brother Provisional]

  This would make an awesome Muslimgauze album cover. I’m sure that Soleilmoon records still have unreleased material that they could put this on. Maybe they could do a remix album based on the track “Help Afghanistan to Grow More Poppies” off the forth disk of the Box of Silk and Dogs.

• [Dan]

  Another example of awesome content marred by clunky, overwrought Flash.

  I wish artistic people the world over got over the whole designing their pages entirely in Flash.