POPPY FARMS SPREAD TO PERU TO AVOID U.S. CRACKDOWNS

WASHINGTON - The opium poppy, the raw ingredient for heroin, has been found
in Peru, where it has spread from Colombia, underscoring the difficulty of
containing the boundaries of the drug war.

"We're finding it in high altitudes in Peru," said Rand Beers, assistant
secretary of state for international law enforcement and narcotics affairs.

Drug traffickers introduced poppy to Colombia a decade ago, seeking to
diversify from cocaine to heroin.

Drug-enforcement experts say Colombia is the source of as much as 75
percent of the heroin found along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.

Beers said he didn't have solid figures on how much opium poppy has been
discovered in Peru, but traffickers there also seem to want to broaden
their sources of income.

"The traffickers understand that more is better than less, and that
different products are better than a single product," Beers said.

Poppy usually is grown at high altitudes. Farmers slit the poppy plant to
extract a milky latex gum that is processed into opium and heroin.
Traditionally, the poppy is grown in Central and Southeast Asia.

Authorities are noticing "rapid increases in cultivation of opium poppy" in
Peru as traffickers look for "geographic regions that are outside of the
current target areas," according to a Web site of the U.S. Agency for
International Development.

Peruvian officials, too, are worried that aggressive, U.S.-financed aerial
fumigation of coca and poppy plantations in Colombia will cause a
"spillover" effect and increase prices for the raw materials for narcotics
in their country, stimulating the drug trade.

"The increase in coca-leaf prices is motivating peasants to return to coca
cultivation," Peru's ambassador to the United States, Carlos Alzamora,
wrote in a letter last month to Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill.