The good news is that Afghanistan has developed a new industry that gives it something valuable to export other than heroin. The bad news is that it is methamphetamine.
As everybody who became an expert in the chemistry of methamphetamine cooking by watching Breaking Bad knows, one of the hurdles to setting up an illegal methamphetamine factory is the acquisition of ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, the key ingredient in most meth production. For years, meth producers relied on such laborious measures as buying vast amounts of over-the-counter cough syrup and slowly extracting pseudoephedrine from it, thereby producing the raw material out of which methamphetamine ultimately is synthesized. Afghanistan is not a country that one would describe as richly blessed with natural resources, but it is home to wild-growing Ephedra sinica, a shrub native to northern China, out of which may be extracted ephedrine and pseudoephedrine.
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