So KBR is getting rich while we turn another six month corner. Guess who else is too:

British officials are bracing themselves for the result of an annual UN poppy survey due later this summer. Early indications show an increase on Helmand’s 1999 record of 45,000 hectares (112,500 acres) and a near-doubling of last year’s crop.

“It’s going to be massive,” said one British drugs official. “My guess is it’s going to be the biggest ever.” UN, American and Afghan officials agreed.

“It could be over 50,000 hectares, or over 50% of the total [Aghan] crop,” said General Muhammad Daud, the deputy interior minister for counter-narcotics. Helmand’s bumper harvest highlights the dramatic failure of western counter-narcotics efforts that have cost at least $2bn (about £1.09bn) since 2001. It could undo progress made last year, when poppy cultivation dropped 21% after President Hamid Karzai’s call for a “jihad” on drugs. And it spells particularly bad news for Britain, which is leading the anti-narcotics campaign and has deployed 3,300 soldiers to the large and lawless province.

As Afghanistan accounts for almost 90% of the world’s heroin supply, that would mean Helmand supplies about one-third. Drug experts say the province is as central to Afghanistan’s illegal economy as California is to America’s legal one.

And this is just the Euro take. Imagine if we had reasonable people talking about the effects of war on the American drug trade.