Pubdate: Tue, 25 Sep 2001
Source: Daily Texan (TX Edu)
Copyright: 2001 Daily Texan
Contact:  http://www.dailytexanonline.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/115
Author: Forrest Wilder, Daily Texan Columnist

AMERICA'S DRUG WAR STILL A LOSING BATTLE

When it comes to drugs, the federal government doesn't have a clue. Now 
that we've completely mucked up - or given up - on the War on Drugs in our 
own country, we're exporting it to another. Plan Colombia is the 
Clinton-Bush administration's $7.5 billion idea that supply and demand is a 
silly old notion that simply doesn't apply anymore.

The concept is this: We eliminate the supply of drugs at its source by 
furnishing the world's most corrupt and criminal country, Colombia, with 
our military resources and proven drug war tactics.

McGruff the Crime Dog joins forces with Monsanto, everyone's favorite Agent 
Orange manufacturer, to spray campesinos' coca crops with the glycophospate 
Round-Up, a common brand of weed killer.

Sometimes, though, the chemical misses its mark and lands on people, like 
Sen. Paul Wellstone found out when he went to Colombia to relieve his 
skepticism about the spraying's accuracy and instead found himself doused 
in it. Other times Round-Up lands on farmers working their legal food 
crops, leaving them with rashes, headaches and nausea.

Meanwhile, well-equipped "good guys" shoot drug traffickers out of the sky 
with American weapons. Sometimes they make mistakes, though, and American 
missionary families come tumbling to the ground like the Bower family in 
April after a CIA plane misidentified their personal aircraft. Whoops.

But in the end, all demand for drugs will disappear in our beloved country 
because the supply no longer exists. A new, D.A.R.E.-ing era of happiness 
and drug-free harmony will dawn.

America is to the drug problem what the bullfighter is to the bull: We wave 
a red carpet in its face, and it chases us around and around. We hope to 
kill it, but it may get us first.

Maybe it really is Colombia's fault. If they didn't make 90 percent of 
America's cocaine and 50 percent of our heroin there wouldn't be a problem.

Those poor suburban white kids in Traffic would be practicing violin or 
shopping at the mall if the rural poor in South America weren't busy 
growing drugs to corrupt our youth. The blame rests squarely on the 
shoulders of those who grow whatever crop pays their meager bills.

The peasants shouldn't be complaining anyway; Plan Colombia offers 
displaced and devastated campesinos $106 million of $7.6 billion in 
"support for alternative development and displacement costs." Surely that 
money will find its way through the government jungle and the jungle itself 
to these evil wardens of the coca plant.

In the War on Drugs, there's only us-and-them - and we can tell whose side 
they're on. And just because the $25 billion we've spent on interdiction 
since 1982 hasn't stemmed the amount or demand of cocaine on the market 
doesn't mean a more militarized, hard-line approach won't work now. And 
just because the street price of cocaine is $70 cheaper than it was in 1971 
doesn't mean that it won't work someday, somehow.

At least think of it this way: The 18 state-of-the-art Blackhawk 
helicopters and 20 Vietnam-era Huey helicopters we're giving the corrupt 
Colombian army this year is providing the U.S. military-industrial complex 
with much needed work in this era of relative peace. With the economy 
taking a downturn, this war might be just what we need.

Speaking of Vietnam, isn't U.S. meddling in the jungle taboo? Fuerzas 
Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia is a communist insurgency army that 
places an excise tax on coca production to fund their internal rebellion 
against the Colombian government.

FARC certainly complicates matters when declaring a War (on Drugs or 
whatever). It doesn't take too much of an imagination or skeptical edge to 
realize that more than drugs may be involved in U.S. intervention. Open up 
Colombia to American corporations, give Lockheed-Martin something to do, 
put down the Commies, and tell the American public "we're tough on drugs."

If reductionistic thinking is the hallmark of governmental agencies, then 
Plan Colombia is the cause de celebre of the drugs must be eliminated at 
any cost crowd.

The fact is, America will never win its war on drugs as long as it keeps 
treating itself with such contemptible innocence. The problem does not lie 
with those who provide the supply, but with those who create and constitute 
the demand. There is no enemy casting mean eyes on America's susceptible 
youth, there is no War on Drugs, there is only the rot of a country that 
blames everyone but itself.

Wilder is a English senior
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom