World's largest pot bust

Actually, hash bust. And actually, it was the world's largest drug bust, by weight. The Guardian reports that Afghan police seized 260 tonnes of hashish worth $400 million. The article says that according to a an American general with the NATO, the hash belonged to the Taliban, and he goes on to gloat about how much this is going to hurt the Taliban. (Their profits, according to this NATO guy, would only have been $14 million, but it's unclear whether they'll have to cover the loss of the stash or not.) Of course, I'd be very surprised if even this enormous bust affected the prices of hash in Dutch coffeeshops and elsewhere in Europe, where it likely would have been sent.

As an interesting bit of narco-history, according to an uncited article from Cannabis Culture, poppy cultivation – the crude precursor to opium and heroin – was spurred during the '70s in Afghanistan because of American pressure on the Afghan government to crack down on cannabis cultivation. Since then, both the Taliban and its opposition have used the profits from drug cultivation to fund their operations. Ironically, today cannabis is replacing opium poppies for many farmers because of recent crackdowns on poppy cultivation.