It’s a rare day when we get much good news emanating from Afghanistan. We’ve had a continuation of a brutal twenty-year-long civil war, a reversion of large swathes of the countryside to the control of bandits, and little progress in finding the elusive Osama bin Laden, with what little goods news being interspersed with the odd assassination, terrorist attack, or earthquake.

However, today was most certainly a good news day. Afghanistan’s opium production is now at an all-time high. That’s right, Afghanistan now has more land under drug cultivation than Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia have between them.

“Huh. That’s a… novel… spin. I’m sure the BBC wasn’t quite as positive.”

No, of course they weren’t. Besides the BBC being possibly the most incompetent media outlet in the world (this is what they do), it, along with all the other major players, buys into the statist consensus on drugs far too easily. The fact is that taking drugs affects oneself and oneself only, and is therefore one’s own choice. The state really has no right, never mind a responsibility, to tell the people what they can and can’t do to themselves.

So, let’s look at that BBC story again, in the context of drugs not being bad.

Opium production in Afghanistan has soared to record levels, with an increase on last year of more than a third…

If you replaced the word ‘opium’ with something nice and wholesome - like steel, maybe - you’d get a very nice boast indeed. Imagine it’s the 19th century, and all that matters to the British government is the steel production figures (or, imagine it’s the 19th century and all that matters to the British East Indian government is the opium production figures). Doesn’t that make for a good headline? If I ran a company that increased production by one-third, I’d be looking for a slice of those record bonuses I’ve been hearing about.

… Helmand province is now the biggest single drug-producing area in the world, surpassing whole countries such as Colombia.

Helmand is becoming a competently horizontally-integrated production centre, benefiting from mass economies of scale. What they need to do now is focus on the verticality, preferably looking to get some of the jobs refining the opium from the UK. Isn’t that just called offshoring?

Afghanistan now accounts for more than 93% of the world’s opiates.

OK, that part doesn’t sound good. That sounds like a monopoly to me, which could lead to artificially-raised prices. We’ll have to break up Afghanistan into little pieces to promote competition. Fortunately, I think the warlords have done that for us.

Despite billions of dollars of aid and tens of thousands of international troops, the report says 193,000 hectares of opium poppies are being grown in Afghanistan.

Who said foreign aid doesn’t achieve anything? At several hectares of poppies per soldier, that sounds like a bargain.

“The results are very bad, terrifyingly bad, because cultivation has increased by 17% to an historic level, said Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the Office on Drugs and Crime, “No other country beside China in the 19th Century ever had such a large amount of land dedicated to illegal activities.”

Thank you, Signor Costa, for that here is the crux. Does it matter if it’s illegal? What matters is if it’s immoral. Stalin devoted tens of millions of hectares of prime Siberian real estate to promoting rural development. It used mostly political dissidents as labour, but it was legal, so it was OK, right? So implies Signor Costa.

What we need to do is ask ourselves whether our resources are best deployed in Afghanistan fighting farmers, when they could be fighting terrorists. Worse than that, by hunting down farmers that engage in entirely moral business, we are turning them into terrorists by depriving them of their means of sustenance and survival. That’s why the Taliban has turned Helmand into a fortress, and that’s why British servicemen are dying on an increasingly regular basis. To quote the campaign of the man that presided over half of the so-called ‘War on Drugs’, it’s the economy, stupid. And that’s why, if we want to win the War on Terror, we have to put an end to the War on Drugs.

David Davies, the Conservative MP for Monmouth, has argued for an expansion of the prison system in a post on the blog of the deplorably authoritarian Cornerstone Group. So he claims, prison helps society [sic.] by keeping known criminals off the street, with massive economic ramifications. It’s a rare frosty day in hell when any but the most intransigent statist agrees with the Cornerstone Group, but today is just such a day.

The Cornerstone Group represents just about everything that’s wrong with the Conservative Party. They’re Kinder, Küche, Kirche sort of authoritarians, keen on protecting the privileges of the elite, be they the Church of England or the aristocracy, while oppressing the rights of the masses, be they women or ethnic and religious minorities.

However, in advocating prison, they’re not the ones doing the oppressing. They’re the ones defending the oppressed: the victims of crime. By the back-of-an-envelope calculations performed by the Cornerstone Group on the government’s crime statistics, Davies believes that, by doubling the number of prison places in order to house ‘career criminals’ the country can cut the cost of crime in half. That is, for an outlay of £3bn a year, the country can recoup between £30bn and £45bn.

Unquestionably, one of the great problems of recent times has been the deliberate blurring of the lines between the innocent and the guilty: those whose rights are infringed, and those that infringe upon others rights. We’ve seen the innocent punished through ASBOs, the Terrorism Act, detention without trial, ID cards, trial without jury, and so on. At the same time, victimless crimes, that involve no infringement of others’ rights and are thusly not a matter of state concern, such as drug consumption, are outlawed by the Taliban tendency represented by the Cornerstone Group.

The other side is the one with which David Davies agrees: that the guilty get off without serious punishment, or even punishment at all. Most thieves and burglars escape custodial sentences altogether, while even murderers are released after a few years. If this can be fixed by £3bn, to protect the rights of the people so let down by the current system, it’s worth every penny.

Alternatively, of course, one can free up spaces by decriminalising those current activities that are illegal, but not immoral. Take just one area in particular. 12,567 individuals are held at Her Majesty’s pleasure in England and Wales for ‘drug offences’ [sic.], none of which offend the basic liberties of other people. That’s more than are held for robbery and fraud put together, and comes to 16% of the total prison population. Free these innocents, and the state can keep more murderers, rapists, and robbers incarcerated.

The key is to begin to discriminate between what is moral and what is immoral, and decide whether a given action harms the natural rights - to life, liberty, and property - of other individuals. If it doesn’t, it is completely inexcusable for the state to criminalise such an action, which is the mechanism by which it force its own morality upon other people. At the same time, it is the duty of the state to protect its citizens’ natural rights by preventing criminal abuse. If this quest is harmed by insufficient prison places, then that must be resolved, lest the state lose its raison d’être altogether.