Pubdate: Mon, 11 Jul 2005
Source: Providence Journal, The (RI)
Copyright: 2005 The Providence Journal Company
Contact:  http://www.projo.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/352

THE DUBIOUS DRUG WAR

The pain and vast waste of the endless U.S. battle against the Latin
American drug trade continues. Although the U.S. has spent at least
$5.4 billion on its Andean Antidrug Initiative since 2000, the supply
of cocaine and heroin on U.S. streets remains plentiful and prices
low.

Meanwhile, we continue to poison poor peasants' countryside with
herbicides, and civil war continues in Colombia, the heart of our
theological and unwinnable foreign "war on drugs." While U.S. and
Colombian officials assert that violence related to drug trafficking
has fallen sharply in Colombia, cocaine output has soared in Peru and
Bolivia, as peasants there try to survive by growing coca -- their one
reliable cash crop.

The drug trade by definition moves around with great facility.

If we must spend billions in the Andes, wouldn't it make more sense to
help these farmers move to other crops than focus on coca-plant
destruction?

U.N. figures this month indicated that overall coca production rose 2
percent in the Andean region in 2004. The failure to provide viable
agricultural alternatives to the peasants to permit them to make a
living has not helped.

We gather the main aim of the campaign is to reduce the drug problem
in the United States, wherein live most users.

So what are we doing? Does this harmful project continue out of sheer
inertia, because some government contractors do well off it, or is it
the theology of drug control itself?

And why is there little indication that South American countries are
any more willing and able to take over the "drug war" from Americans
than they were five years ago?

Whatever the war is, we should halt it. One way would be for Congress
not to approve the Bush administration's request for $734.5 million
for the initiative as part of the foreign-aid bill. Another would be
to stop torturing impoverished Latin Americans for our problems, and
move from criminalization to medicalization of America's drug problem.
Making drug use a crime has, of course, increased crime. Treating it
as the medical problem it is (like alcoholism) would remove much of
the corrupt money that courses through the drug-distribution system.

We join the National Taxpayers Union in thinking of one big word for the
Andean Antidrug Initiative: boondoggle.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake