Pubdate: Sun, 26 Jul 2009
Source: Pocono Record, The (Stroudsburg, PA)
Copyright: 2009 Pocono Record
Contact: 
http://www.poconorecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/misc?url=/static/forms/letter_form.htm
Website: http://www.poconorecord.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/4529
Author: Jess Hunter-Bowman
Note: Jess Hunter-Bowman is Bogota-based Andean region director for 
Witness for Peace, a nonprofit organization with 26 years of 
experience monitoring U.S. policy in Latin America.

ENDING 'DRUG WAR' COULD SAVE US $150 MILLION

Let me go over my "this one has got to go" checklist one more time. 
Costly? Some in Washington will disagree, but $150 million is still a 
lot of money to me. Ineffective? The goal was a 50 percent reduction 
in drug crop production and seven years later we have a 23 percent 
increase, so I'd say "ineffective" is on target. Unethical? Even the 
most stone-faced on Capitol Hill would have to admit that spraying an 
untested chemical mixture over innocent civilians despite the U.N.'s 
claim that there is "credible and trustworthy evidence" suggesting 
human health impacts would qualify as unethical.

In 2000, President Clinton and Congress decided to try something new 
in the Drug War. Colombia produced 90 percent of the cocaine consumed 
in the United States and, despite years of anti-drug efforts, there 
was no reduction in the flow of drugs north. Thus a $1.3 billion 
dollar emergency supplemental appropriation to fight drug production 
in Colombia was born. The primary tool contemplated was a 
controversial chemical spray program using crop dusters to target 
coca, the raw material for cocaine.

Nearly $500 million was spent on an exponential growth in the spray 
program, from 43,246 hectares sprayed in 2000 to 133,496 hectares in 2008.

Yet despite spraying 2.6 million acres in Colombia from 2000 through 
2007, coca production actually increased by 23 percent and today 
Colombia still produces 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the 
United States. Maybe there is a reason no other country in the world 
employs an aerial spray program for counter-narcotics purposes.

But to suggest that this policy has simply been ineffective would 
ignore the devastating impact it has had on Colombians. An untold 
number of family farmers have been wrongly targeted. According to the 
State Department, 7,750 of them have filed official complaints for 
wrongful fumigation since 2001. Thousands who turned to coca 
production to make a modest living -- experts estimate an average 
coca farmer has a gross annual income of $7,000 -- responded to calls 
to leave behind coca production and join alternative development 
programs, only to see those new crops destroyed when the fumigation 
planes mistakenly targeted them.

Colombians were told that spraying an untested chemical mixture over 
farms and homes) from planes in the second-most bio-diverse country 
in the world would not cause human health or environmental problems. 
Today early evidence suggests that both human health and the 
environment were indeed put at risk by this program.

Thousands of health complaints reported in recently sprayed 
communities were corroborated when the U.N. Special Rapporteur on 
Health conducted a field visit and determined that there is "credible 
and trustworthy evidence" that fumigations are harmful to human health.

New reports suggest disturbing environmental impacts of the spray 
program in the Amazon basin region as well. A recent scientific study 
revealed that 50 percent of amphibians were killed in less than 96 
hours by exposure to the spray program's chemical mixture. And the 
U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime further indicated that fumigation 
leads to deforestation as coca farmers move deeper into virgin forest 
to avoid being sprayed. The U.N. estimates nearly 400,000 acres of 
virgin forests were razed by such farmers between 2001 and 2007.

Given the horrendous decade-long track record of this 
counter-narcotics spray program in Colombia -- no reduction in drug 
production, wrongfully sprayed farmers combined with human health and 
environmental impacts -- Congress needs to send it to the trash bin.

Cutting the bankrupt aerial spray program could save taxpayers $150 
million dollars next year, still a lot of money where I'm from.

- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard R Smith Jr