Sometimes drugs > no drugs

Imagine you want to end 80% of the world's opium production, and you could actually probably do it. See, you're essentially the only military presence in the area, and you're highly technologically advanced compared to the drug runners. You could probably take them all out with defoliating raids and be done with the destructive and destabilizing element of opium forever.

Sounds good, but Slate suggests that ending opium in one fell swoop would be more destabilizing than leaving it.

See, in a country that produces 80% of the world's opium, that crop amounts to roughly 50% of the country's gross domestic product, and to destroy 50% of an already poor country's national income would be infinitely more disastrous than the money drug lords funnel into local militias. Or so says Barnett Rubin, "an irascible NYU Afghan expert".

It must ire the hell out of drug hawks, but even the military seems to believe this is the way to go. It's a sad reality, but if we destroy Afghanistan's #1 industry without having another to make up the difference, the destabilization we see in drug kingpins and corrupt local militias will pale in comparison to the destabilizing factors of poverty, famine.

And whereas this current destabilizing influence is kind of diffuse and self-serving, just enough to keep the drug lords in power and profitable, the rage of a destroyed cash crop with nothing to fill the void would be concentrated directly at one thing, the people that destroyed it.

You know, us.

The Afghan people seem pretty happy with us at the moment [despite the Newsweek riots; relative to other nations we're building; relative to the sentiments of other predominantly Muslim nations] why screw with relative calm?