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