America’s policies on illicit narcotics have long displayed evidence of having been crafted by people who give the appearance of having dabbled in a few recreational pharmaceuticals themselves.

When the amount of U.S.-bound cocaine intercepted in the Gulf of Mexico dropped off after a few years of steadily increasing hauls in the 1980s for instance, Washington’s Drug Enforcement Agency took the statistics to indicate that it was winning its “war on drugs.” It took several years for the hapless drugbusters to realize that many of their adversaries had simply adopted a roundabout route, taking advantage of Canada’s endless coastline and then shipping their wares overland through the porous entry points on the world’s longest unprotected border.

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Lebanon's eradication of drug farming in the Bekaa valley is threatened by the government's failure to deliver promised aid to farmers, reports David Sharrock in London's liberal Guardian.

Under U.S. pressure, Lebanon began destroying its drug crops in 1993. By early 1998, Lebanon was removed from the U.S. State Department's list of drug-producing countries.

But the drug trade was a major pillar of the Lebanese economy -- especially in the Bekaa -- and replacement crops yield a tiny fraction of the profits once provided by cannabis or opium. Little agricultural aid has arrived. The resulting economic depression led to violent confrontation last year [see Regional Reports, WPR, April, 1998].

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Money Woes Wither Substitution Program

Baalbek, Lebanon

One recent afternoon in the Bekaa Valley, Ali Shreif plucked a small branch from an oak tree and illustrated the technique that made him a rich man during the height of Lebanon's civil war.

"You dry the leaf in the sun," he explained, pressing on his impromptu model. "Then, when the cold comes, you scrape off the residue and make it into powder."

The end result of that simple process-when applied to the cannabis plants Shreif grew - is hashish that can be sold on the street for $1,500 a kilo. With 25 acres of fertile land in his family's possession, Shreif says he produced as much as 500 kilos of the drug each year during the 1975-91 war.

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SIDON, Lebanon, Aug 30 (AFP) - A grocer selling alcoholic beverages was murdered Sunday and another seriously wounded in the first anti-liquor attacks in the Sidon area for a year, Lebanese police said.

Two men burst into Wajih Ramadan's shop in Wadi Zayne, five kilometres (three miles) north of Sidon, and opened fire with a machine gun, killing Ramadan instantly.

The pair then fled on a motorcycle to Ramile, just outside Sidon, where they entered the store of grocer Abu Fadi Abbas and shot him also, police said.

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AALBEK, Lebanon - During Lebanon's long civil war, the Bekaa Valley flourished as one of the world's most fertile regions for growing cannabis for hashish and poppies for heroin. In 1992, as it struggled to emerge from more than a decade of self-destruction and lawlessness, Lebanon successfully controlled its illicit drug crops, with the support of the United States. But in the process it left tens of thousands of farmers indigent.

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Family Planning Body Lectures Soldiers On Substance Abuse

Lebanese army officers yesterday began a "refresher" training seminar on combating drug addiction in order to lend a hand to a national campaign by non-governmental organisations.

Almost 40 male and female officers attending the three-day seminar and workshop at the Choueifat Women's Association offered their assessment and noted the difficulty of applying theoretical concepts.

General secretary of the Lebanon Family Planning Association (LFPA) Toufic Osseiran said training the army yields better results due to soldiers' sense of commitment, dedication and discipline. "University students gave up very quickly. Soldiers are devoted to things they set their minds to. This itself proves our mission is on the right track," Osseiran said.

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A television crew from American news giant CNN today found itself under a hail of gunfire from drug growers in the heart of Lebanon's marijuana plantations, CNN bureau chief in Beirut Brent Sadler said.

The British Sadler and his team of German cameraman Christian Streib, Lebanese producer Nada Husseini and their driver were escorted by the owner of a cannabis plantation and his agricultural engineer in the eastern Bekaa valley, the hub of the country's drug trade.

Suddenly they stumbled into an ambush.

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