Sabbath 7/7/28/120
Dear Friends,
This coming week we are getting ready for the Day of Atonement and we will arrive at Tabernacles for Ingathering. Think about your offering also as this year we need assistance in the form of offerings, as it is the basis of our income in the Sabbath Year (see the paper Tithing (No. 161)). There is much to do.
As we consider the Law of God in this Seventh Month of the Seventh Year of the cycle being the 28th year of the 120th Jubilee, we might also consider a strange fact of coincidence, if one can call it that.
In 1999 Afghanistan was a country ruled by warring factions and those factions trafficked in opium. This drug was used for medicine but, usually, from this source, it was a drug of illicit trade being used in the heroin trade and it enslaved and killed millions. In 1999 the opium production of Afghanistan for heroin was 4,800 tonnes per annum.
In 1999 the Taliban seized control and began to suppress opium production. Most of the opium from there found its way to the West and killed our youth in Britain and the USA and also elsewhere in Europe, but mainly in Britain and the USA.
By 2001 the Taliban had brought opium production down to 185 tonnes for the year. This raised serious problems for the European and US drug dealers. The suppression also angered the Afghan farmers who had become dependent on it and the warlords who profited from opium production. Somehow the Taliban had to be removed.
The west was convinced that it was a dreadful regime and the Taliban suppressed women and all those other dreadful things that they did.
After the Taliban were removed and the new regime was established, the opium production got into full swing and the opium trade is now almost back to normal. In 2004 production was up to 4,200 tonnes despite claims to suppress it. The attempts at suppression are made much of, but the US military and other forces have only managed to wipe out about 200 ha of some 25,000 ha of the opium crop, or less than 1% of the crop. In Vietnam the US managed to wipe out whole forests with relative ease. This reduction is sheer tokenism. Much of the area is under UK control. That is the country where the drug is destined to arrive and kill thousands of young Britons.
President Karzai is said to be genuinely trying to suppress the opium crop but the local officials and governors are so involved in the trade that he is said to be hamstrung.
The farmers like the crop because it is easy to harvest and stores well in view of the transport difficulties.
The British and US have control of the poppy fields. A new army is being raised and that will also control the fields in future years. The army of occupation destroy bits but the overall fields are massive. Australian television reported on this problem on Tuesday, 23 August 2005.
The UK officials say it will take twenty years before the crop is reduced. The year 2030 is given as the likely year for the effective reduction.
The answer to this problem appears to be that it is being encouraged and not reduced. The army is not being directed at the elimination of the crop but rather at its maintenance at high levels through token reductions.
The best one can say is that the occupation force has decided not to alienate the populace, but rather accept that heroin in Afghanistan is going to kill thousands of British addicts and that is an acceptable risk of war. After all, they would get it from somewhere would they not; or would they really do that?
The worst face of this nightmare is that the officials are corrupt even to the political direction of the armies of occupation, and they have deliberately got the system back into production after the Taliban were so misguided as to interfere with this comfortable racket.
The implications for not only this war and tragedy, but other wars of occupation, are horrendous indeed. What we can be sure of is that when Messiah comes to refurbish this planet and set up the Kingdom of God, then God’s Laws will be in place and there will be no room for the sort of corrupt government or power groups that would willingly sacrifice their own people for money and expediency.
There is something seriously wrong with the will and thinking of the people of the West in view of the drug problem, and the inability to control the problem when the armies are actually in control of the means of production of the major source of heroin in the UK.
At the very best face of this problem, the leaders are incompetent and need to be replaced. At worst, they should be charged and imprisoned.
The fact is that the administration is now used to attack and destroy the credibility of everyone that opposes them, and uses misinformation to its own ends.
Pray that God brings this system to account soon and cuts short the time of the end so that the elect might be saved.
Pray that God stamps this sort of corruption out and saves
His people from the slow death and genetic damage of drug addiction that are
inflicted on His people through their own weaknesses.
Wade Cox
Coordinator General
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