And use the opium for medical purposes.

A British company is trying to recruit farmers to grow opium poppies to meet the urgent need to stockpile more supplies of diamorphine should its production be disrupted by an outbreak of pandemic flu. At the same time British troops are fighting and dying in Afghanistan to disrupt the Taleban’s control of the soaring opium harvest that has made Afghanistan overwhelmingly the source of heroin now flooding into Britain and Western Europe.

The failure to halt this deadly trade is one of the factors fuelling the violence, impoverishing the debt-burdened farmers and entrenching the warlords and Taleban fighters in a swath of southern Afghanistan. It is, surely, also a terrible indictment of policy-makers in Kabul, in Nato capitals and in the United Nations who could transform the poppy harvest from a scourge to a blessing but have failed to do so.

Afghanistan is now awash with opium. Production has risen by around 15 per cent since 2006, with some 457,000 acres under cultivation compared with last year’s total of 408,000, according to US data. More than 92 per cent of all heroin sold in Europe originates in Afghanistan, and the proportion is still rising. Helmand province alone, where British forces are deployed against Taleban fighters, accounts for a third of the crop.