Photo: Esparta (flickr)

Mexican President Felipe Calderon's war on drugs targets the drug cartels that constitute a large portion of Mexico’s economy. Drug trafficking is an estimated US$50 billion a year business there. In fact, one study reported that the loss of the drug business would shrink Mexico's economy by 63 percent.

These statistics seem to beg the question: Can Mexico eliminate its drug trade without inflicting too much damage on its own economy?

The drug war's economic impact isn't necessarily positive, either. The Mexican government estimates that the jump in violence resulting from its crackdown on drugs has taken a percentage point off the country's economic growth. Costs for Mexican businesses, who need increased security, have increased by 5 to 10 percent.

But the cost in human lives is readily apparent. Earlier this year, for example, two children and a police officer's wife were murdered as Tijuana schools and neighborhoods were evacuated in the search of a drug-cartel official. The murders came in retaliation for the arrest of other cartel members days before. In August, gunmen killed 13 people — including a baby — when they opened fire in a dance hall. And kidnappings are now commonplace.

Mexico's drug war has resulted in over 4,000 drug-related deaths since 2006, including Mexico City’s federal police chief and 400 other police officers.

Last weekend tens of thousands of Mexicans gathered to protest the bloodshed. But despite the violence, residents of Badiraguato, considered the heart of the drug trade, told Newsweek they don't want trafficking to end.

"The drug traffickers do good things here. They employ people. There's no corn, no beans here — the people here are all about drugs," said 22-year-old José de Jesús Landell García, who co-owns a shoe shop with his father. He added that most of his friends took up employment with the drug cartels "because it was the only thing they could do."

Calderon's government faces a nasty predicament. How does Mexico dismantle a system so firmly entrenched in the state and the economy? For starters, at least, it will require steps to increase Mexicans' faith in their government — particularly in its ability to offer them good-paying jobs in licit trades.

Photo: (C)n Burgos (flickr)

Opium is widely recognized as a major obstacle to economic development and postwar reconstruction in Afghanistan. It's estimated that Afghanistan currently produces between 90 and 95 percent of the world's opium. It's an approximately US$4 billion industry that accounts for just over half of the country's total GDP. And, according to Newsweek, most of that money goes to traffickers and corrupt officials. The average opium grower makes only US$300 a year.

What is to be done? The numbers indicate that the U.S.-led counter-narcotics program, which focuses primarily on poppy eradication, has been unsuccessful. Opium production has skyrocketed since the Taliban's overthrow; the UN reported a 34 percent rise from 2006 to 2007. Other programs that look to curb opium production by providing farmers with other crops or alternative livelihoods have also had limited success.

An international security-and-development policy group thinks there's an unexplored option. The Senlis Council is advocating a "Poppy for Medicine" program in which individual Afghan villages would be licensed to turn poppy into morphine, rather than heroin. In theory, this program would allow existing opium crops to be diverted into legal markets for medical painkillers.

In theory, this sounds workable. Similar projects have been successful in India, Thailand, and Turkey. But standing in the way of implementing the same program in Afghanistan are two probably insurmountable obstacles — one political and one economic.

The Afghan government opposes opium's legalization; the crop is banned by the country's constitution. Then there's a report from Britain's Royal Society of Chemistry, which says there simply isn't sufficient demand for opium for medical purposes. Afghanistan poppy growers would have to corner the market on medical opium — and then double it — to sell out their crop.