About 0.1 million people die from opiate drug-related causes each year (see
Australian National Drug Research Centre: http://db.ndri.curtin.edu.au/media.asp?mediarelid=40
; UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), “Addiction, crime and insurgency. The
transnational threat of Afghan opium”, 2009: http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/Afghanistan/Afghan_Opium_Trade_2009_web.pdf
) and hence about 0.8 million have died since the invasion of Afghanistan in
October 2001, of whom about 90%, i.e. 0.9 x 0.8 million = 0.7 million people,
have died as a result of the huge expansion of the Afghan opium industry under
US Alliance occupation.
In 2005 in the US, of 18,347 deaths due to narcotics and psychodysleptics,
12, 262 were due to heroin (2,011), other opioids (5,789) or methadone (4,462)
(see Health E-stat, “Increases in poisoning and methadone-related deaths: United
States,1999-2005 “: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/poisoning/poisoning.pdf
) . Given the over 90% contribution of
the US restoration of the Taliban-destroyed opium industry to world illicit
heroin production, and the interconnectedness and effective
indistinguishability of "Afghan-derived heroin" from the
"pool" of other abusively-used opiates, one can accordingly crudely
estimate 0.9 x 12,262 persons/year x 8 years = 88,286 US opiate drug-related
deaths (0.9 x 2,011 deaths/year x 8 years = 14,479 heroin-related deaths)
connected with the aftermath of the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.
