'Seeds Of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling The Taliban And Al Qaeda'

[The Streets Don't Love You Back]

The Taliban may earn as much as $500 million every year from the drug trade. Yet the US does not classify the Taliban as a drug–trafficking organization. Should the US make a bigger effort to disrupt the opium trade in Afghanistan? Will destroying poppy fields only hurt small farmers but not the larger organization? Is it even possible to dismantle the opium trade without tearing apart Afghanistan's fragile economy? Journalist Gretchen Peters joins us to get to the bottom of the connection between the Taliban and the drug trade.

Guest(s)

Gretchen Peters is a journalist whose work has appeared in The National Geographic Society, The Christian Science Monitor, The New Republic, NPR and CNN. She covered Pakistan and Afghanistan for more than a decade, first for The Associated Press and later as a reporter for ABC News. Her book is "Seeds of Terror." She joins us from Colorado.think