Pubdate: Thu, 30 Aug 2001
Source: Baltimore Sun (MD)
Copyright: 2001 The Baltimore Sun, a Times Mirror Newspaper.
Contact:  http://www.sunspot.net/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/37
Author: Steve Chapman
Note: Steve Chapman is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

FANTASY OF HALTED DRUG SUPPLY LINGERS

CHICAGO - It's been four months since a Peruvian fighter shot down a U.S. 
missionary plane wrongly suspected of smuggling drugs, and the Peruvian 
government is ready to stop wallowing in grief. It wants to get back to 
intercepting such flights, just as soon as it can persuade the United 
States to go along.

Why? Because the interdiction effort, in its view, has been an enormous 
success. The amount of Peruvian land planted in coca, the stuff from which 
cocaine is made, has declined by 70 percent since 1995. The foreign 
minister worries that if the anti-smuggling campaign doesn't resume soon, 
drug production could increase.

But the success is less than meets the eye. In the first place, it comes at 
a high cost. In the April debacle, a Baptist missionary and her infant 
daughter died when their aircraft - clearly marked and in radio contact 
with air traffic controllers - was fired on by a Peruvian fighter working 
in tandem with a CIA surveillance plane.

This incident, however, was not a surprise. President Clinton approved the 
program in 1994 despite a State Department memo that concluded, "There is a 
risk of killing people not involved in criminal activity." The department 
warned that "a shootdown leading to the death of innocent persons would 
likely be a serious diplomatic embarrassment for the United States." Not to 
mention that some innocent persons would be dead.

Some supporters of the drug war may think a couple of dead bystanders in 
South America is a reasonable tradeoff for reducing drug supplies and 
discouraging consumption here. Unfortunately, the deaths were wholly in 
vain. Peru's drug harvest has declined, but growers have simply expanded 
production elsewhere to take up the slack. In neighboring Colombia, which 
has stepped forward to replace Peru as the world's biggest exporter, coca 
output has risen 168 percent since 1995.

Trying to stop millions of Third World farmers from doing what they need to 
do to feed their families is a task on the order of building sand castles 
during a hurricane. Perversely, successful coca eradication programs only 
push up the prices paid to those who manage to grow it. Every success 
contains the seeds of failure.

The remedy being offered by the two governments is massive spraying of 
herbicides to destroy coca in the fields. But small farmers find that the 
spraying often also destroys the legal crops they plant for food, a 
development that caused the United Nations to denounce the program as 
"inhuman."

The desire to choke off the supply of illicit drugs is an old fantasy that 
stubbornly resists being translated into reality. Time and again, the U.S. 
government and its allies have launched massive campaigns to eradicate 
crops or stamp out smuggling. Many of them have succeeded at their direct 
purpose - but none has actually made it hard for Americans to keep 
snorting, smoking or shooting up.

In each case, says Kevin Zeese, president of the organization Common Sense 
for Drug Policy, "the effect is to create new drug traffickers, new routes, 
new sources, and new drugs." The cocaine epidemic of the 1980s came about 
because of anti-marijuana efforts in the 1970s. Anti- heroin efforts in 
Pakistan and Thailand caused production to shift to Afghanistan and Burma.

Now, the Taliban government in Afghanistan is cracking down on poppy- 
growing, which helps to explain why heroin production is on the rise in 
Colombia. Even if Washington and Bogota could uproot every evil plant in 
Colombia, poor peasants someplace else would quickly be recruited to fill 
the gap.

The problem lies in the law of supply and demand, which no government can 
repeal. The flow of drugs will continue as long as there are Americans 
willing to pay handsomely to get high. So maybe we should stop expecting 
the rest of the world to save us from ourselves.
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MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart