Pubdate: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 Source: Arizona Daily Star (AZ) Copyright: 2000 Pulitzer Publishing Co. Contact: http://www.azstarnet.com/ Author: Randy Serraglio Note: Randy Serraglio has been a Tucson resident for 10 years and is the director of the School of Americas Watch/Southwest. MORE DOLLARS FOR HOPELESS DRUG WAR Years ago, I had a very dear friend who began using cocaine, as millions do. He would stay up all night and have a great time. I knew from my college experience that most people who try that drug, despite its potential for negative impacts on their health, do not become addicted and do not destroy their lives with it. Consequently, I didn't think much about it, at first. After a while, though, it became a problem. I didn't use it myself, and I didn't like the effect it had on his personality. It began to push us apart. Soon it became clear he was among the unlucky fraction that succumbs to the addictive properties of the drug. It changed him, in frightening ways. He stayed up for days. He began to look sickly and tense, even when he wasn't using. The color in his flesh faded as the addiction gripped his soul. I was still very young then. I wanted to help him, but I felt helpless. I desperately wanted to do the right thing, but I had no idea what to do. One could say that we as a nation have shared this feeling in our collective conscience throughout the failed war on drugs. We have been told for almost 20 years that the way to stop such human damage is to fight a war on an inhuman enemy. Along the way, relatively little has been done to treat and heal the human damage itself. Now the Clinton administration has proposed an aid package that will take the drug war to a new level. It proposes to spend $1.3 billion fighting the drug war in Colombia over the next two years. Almost $1 billion will take the form of military aid to the Colombian armed forces, which have by far the most abusive human rights record in this hemisphere. It is no coincidence the Colombian military has sent more soldiers to the U.S. Army School of the Americas than any other Latin American military. Counting an additional $300 million that was already spent last year, more than 80 percent of the $1.6 billion total is in military aid. Another $100 million will be spent spraying poisonous herbicides all over the Colombian countryside in an effort to eradicate cultivation of coca and poppy plants. Meanwhile, less than 10 percent will be spent on the kind of crop substitution programs that have been proven to work. Only a tiny fraction will be spent to help reform the corrupt Colombian judicial system. This latest brainchild comes despite mounds of evidence showing it will do little to stem the flow of drugs. A few years ago, the Rand Corp. released a major study showing that the least effective expenditures in the drug war were those spent on eradication and suppression of the source in the country of origin. The study found the most effective dollars were those spent here in the United States, treating and preventing the human damage caused by drug addiction. But do we really need an arcane study to tell us this? This is simple common sense: We should deal with our own problem here, by reducing the demand, rather than continuing to externalize our problem by attempting - and failing - to reduce the supply. As long as millions of people spend billions of dollars on illegal drugs here, many thousands of small farmers in Colombia and elsewhere will be willing to risk retribution to grow coca or poppies and get 20 times the price they would for any other crop. This is the sort of simple market dynamics that free traders such as our own Rep. Jim Kolbe should readily understand. Congress should reject the administration's expensive proposal based on this analysis alone: It simply will not work. But there is an even greater issue at stake here. The war on drugs may be fought against an inhuman enemy, but its victims are indeed human. They are the addicts, whose need for treatment centers and health care is ignored. They are the general users, especially people of color, whose rights are routinely violated as they are rounded up in ever greater numbers by an increasingly repressive and racist justice system. They are the families that are destroyed when the providers are carted off to prison for simple possession or small-time dealing. They are the children who grow up in violent neighborhoods where economic alternatives to the drug trade are few and far between. They are Colombians, whose civil institutions are corrupted by the distortions of billions of dollars pouring in from U.S. drug consumers and who suffer from the violence that is fueled by so much illicit money. Colombians have suffered much already from a civil conflict that has raged for years. It has displaced more than 1.5 million people, twice the number as the Kosovo conflict. A repressive regime continues to massacre civilians, while guerrillas kidnap for ransom and destroy badly needed infrastructure. Drug money now fuels both sides of this conflict. The guerrillas protect growers and tax the trade, while the army and its surrogate paramilitaries are involved directly in trafficking. Colombians are weary of the seemingly endless cycle of violence, and now our government proposes to throw another $1 billion worth of gas on this fire. Much of the military aid will take the form of Special Forces ''counter-narcotics'' training. U.S. Army Special Forces members themselves have admitted there is little difference between counter-narcotics training and the sort of counterinsurgency training that has resulted in endemic human rights abuses in El Salvador, Guatemala, East Timor and elsewhere. In fact, the trainers are some of the very same units that have been working with the abusive Colombian military for years. The results of this latest proposal are likely to be more of the same: Drugs will continue to flow and Colombians will continue to die. A more logical and humanitarian aid package to Colombia would emphasize relief aid for people displaced by the violence, crop substitution programs for poor desperate farmers and programs to strengthen investigations into corruption and human rights abuses. Meanwhile, the administration should pressure the Colombian regime to negotiate in good faith with the guerrillas. A more logical and humanitarian strategy for the $18 billion a year we spend fighting drugs would emphasize treatment and prevention, rather than the two-thirds that is now spent on interdiction and law enforcement. U.S. taxpayers should consider well the nature of the Clinton administration's aid package before deciding which way their representatives should vote. It looks more like the Cold War than the drug war. As for the drug war, all of us should ask ourselves this question: How many Colombians will our tax dollars kill before we feel as if we're doing the right thing? - --- MAP posted-by: Greg