In 2000 the leader of the Afghan Taliban Mullah Mohammad Omar, issued an edict banning cultivation of the Opium poppy because it was 'un-Islamic', with anyone caught growing the crop being severely punished. When the Taliban say severe they must mean it. Look at the drop off in area cultivated for the year 2001 in the graph below. 82,172 hectares in 2000 dropped to only 7,606 hectares in 2001. That's a drop of 91% in a single year. Now that's how you fight a war on drugs if you really mean it.
If you want to get a bit more raw data on this you can read the UN survey/report from 2000 here and for the year 2001 here. For those interested, all reports between 2000 and 2017 can be found here
The United States invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 and it isn't difficult to see what impact this had on opium cultivation but the story doesn't end there. Stories started coming out in 2015 about a new strain of poppy seeds that had been delivered to farmers all over Afghanistan that produced plants that "grow bigger, faster, use less water than seeds they've used before, and give up to double the amount of opium". Here's a link to a story covering this.
Where did the seeds come from? Nobody knows but it doesn't take a genius to work out that they were probably genetically modified and GM seeds aren't the sort of thing that your average Afghan farmer can produce in his backyard.
People need to wake up to the fact that the US government (more specifically the CIA) control the drug supply in Afghanistan and the money raised is used to fund black ops and some of the more dirty wars the US gets involved in. This isn't a new thing either. They've got their hands in the drug pie all over the world. Remember back in 2007 when a CIA plane crashed in Mexico with over four tonnes of cocaine on board? Here's a link to a story about it.
More people need to start waking up to how the world really works before WW3 starts. I think the tide might be turning judging by the reaction of many to the ridiculous and obvious set up for invasion of Syria by the United States when they said Syria was about to launch a chemical weapons attack, but unfortunately there are still millions who are sufficiently brainwashed and apathetic to believe it.