FANTASY OF HALTED DRUG SUPPLY LINGERS

CHICAGO - It's been four months since a Peruvian fighter shot down a U.S.
missionary plane wrongly suspected of smuggling drugs, and the Peruvian
government is ready to stop wallowing in grief. It wants to get back to
intercepting such flights, just as soon as it can persuade the United
States to go along.

Why? Because the interdiction effort, in its view, has been an enormous
success. The amount of Peruvian land planted in coca, the stuff from which
cocaine is made, has declined by 70 percent since 1995. The foreign
minister worries that if the anti-smuggling campaign doesn't resume soon,
drug production could increase.

But the success is less than meets the eye. In the first place, it comes at
a high cost. In the April debacle, a Baptist missionary and her infant
daughter died when their aircraft - clearly marked and in radio contact
with air traffic controllers - was fired on by a Peruvian fighter working
in tandem with a CIA surveillance plane.

This incident, however, was not a surprise. President Clinton approved the
program in 1994 despite a State Department memo that concluded, "There is a
risk of killing people not involved in criminal activity." The department
warned that "a shootdown leading to the death of innocent persons would
likely be a serious diplomatic embarrassment for the United States." Not to
mention that some innocent persons would be dead.

Some supporters of the drug war may think a couple of dead bystanders in
South America is a reasonable tradeoff for reducing drug supplies and
discouraging consumption here. Unfortunately, the deaths were wholly in
vain. Peru's drug harvest has declined, but growers have simply expanded
production elsewhere to take up the slack. In neighboring Colombia, which
has stepped forward to replace Peru as the world's biggest exporter, coca
output has risen 168 percent since 1995.

Trying to stop millions of Third World farmers from doing what they need to
do to feed their families is a task on the order of building sand castles
during a hurricane. Perversely, successful coca eradication programs only
push up the prices paid to those who manage to grow it. Every success
contains the seeds of failure.

The remedy being offered by the two governments is massive spraying of
herbicides to destroy coca in the fields. But small farmers find that the
spraying often also destroys the legal crops they plant for food, a
development that caused the United Nations to denounce the program as
"inhuman."

The desire to choke off the supply of illicit drugs is an old fantasy that
stubbornly resists being translated into reality. Time and again, the U.S.
government and its allies have launched massive campaigns to eradicate
crops or stamp out smuggling. Many of them have succeeded at their direct
purpose - but none has actually made it hard for Americans to keep
snorting, smoking or shooting up.

In each case, says Kevin Zeese, president of the organization Common Sense
for Drug Policy, "the effect is to create new drug traffickers, new routes,
new sources, and new drugs." The cocaine epidemic of the 1980s came about
because of anti-marijuana efforts in the 1970s. Anti- heroin efforts in
Pakistan and Thailand caused production to shift to Afghanistan and Burma.

Now, the Taliban government in Afghanistan is cracking down on poppy-
growing, which helps to explain why heroin production is on the rise in
Colombia. Even if Washington and Bogota could uproot every evil plant in
Colombia, poor peasants someplace else would quickly be recruited to fill
the gap.

The problem lies in the law of supply and demand, which no government can
repeal. The flow of drugs will continue as long as there are Americans
willing to pay handsomely to get high. So maybe we should stop expecting
the rest of the world to save us from ourselves.