Heroin overdose rates are going way up in Wisconsin, and probably elsewhere in the United States, because of prices on the market.

A new report by the (local) Dane County Narcotics and Gang Task Force notes that cocaine, the biggest killer for many years, has gotten a lot more expensive, due to the escalating narco-wars in Mexico.

Meanwhile, Heroin, a derivative of Poppies (the flowers that put Dorothy to sleep in the Wizard of Oz), is Afghanistan’s largest export, and funds much of the Taliban’s budget in its ongoing wars in South and Central Asia. That itself is fairly significant of a moral objection: when you shoot up the Taliban make money.

Heroin may get more expensive for a short while, as US and Afghan forces seized a hundred tons of heroin and poppy products the other day. But competing poppy production is also present in Colombia and Southeast Asia, so heroin is not going away any time soon.

In the spring of 2001, when their biggest threat was international outrage over the demolition of ancient Buddhist statues, the Taliban decreed heroin production un-Islamic, according to this report from June 2001 in the Telegraph of London. Today, that principled stance is on hold, as the Taliban need more money.

[photo credit: Bayer brand Heroin, from Wikipedia]