James Emery

About the author: James Emery is a journalist and anthropologist who has followed the drug trade in the United States and overseas for fifteen years.

The international heroin trade is extremely lucrative. Nations such as Afghanistan and Serbia smuggle heroin into Western Europe and the United States in order to raise money for warfare. Smugglers often justify their illegal activities by claiming that the money they earn is needed to fund important religious or political causes; such arguments are hypocritical, however, because drug trafficking goes against the laws and religious values of the countries which the smugglers claim to serve.

Much of the heroin that ravages human lives and society in Europe's inner cities arises paradoxically in Afghanistan, a nation of strictly enforced Islamic laws where drugs are banned by scriptural edict. The powerful narcotic flows...