AMERICA'S WAR ON DRUGS

Lawmakers, CEOs, Police Chiefs, Academics And Artists Talk About One Of The
Most Controversial Issues Of Our Time

Since 1968, the United States has spent increasing amounts of taxpayers'
money - more than $40 billion last year - trying to stop drug use through
the criminal-justice system. Three-fourths of federal anti-drug money goes
to police, prisons, border patrol and interdiction efforts in countries
like Colombia. Only one-fourth goes to prevention and treatment. Thirty
years after war was declared, there are no fewer drug addicts but more
people in prison for drug crimes than ever before. Half a million of
America's 2 million prisoners are locked away for drugs, and 700,000 people
are arrested each year for marijuana possession alone. In 2001, a record
seventy-four percent of Americans say they believe the Drug War is failing.
The majority say drug addiction should be approached as a disease, not a
crime. In these pages, we asked lawmakers, scientists, police and
law-enforcement officials, prominent journalists, musicians, academics,
business leaders and authors to contribute to a newly energized debate
about the future of American drug policy. Even President Bush's nominee to
head the Drug Enforcement Administration, Republican congressman Asa
Hutchinson, admits that the public is frustrated and that change is
necessary. "We need to show that we're not simply trying to put nonviolent
users in jail," he tells Rolling Stone. The War on Drugs has become a war
against the nation's citizens. The time for drug-law reform is now. -- Jann
S. Wenner

DAN RATHER - ANCHOR AND MANAGING EDITOR, THE CBS EVENING NEWS

There's a general sense that what we have been doing in the so-called Drug
War simply doesn't work. And the situation, in many important ways, has
gotten worse, not better. There's a sense that we're in a losing game, and
you don't stay in a losing game. So what should we do now? I agreed with
[Clinton drug czar] Barry McCaffrey when he said it's been a mistake to do
it as a war. He thought a better comparison is cancer. We've been in the
fight against cancer with the real and certain knowledge that it's going to
be long, and there's no magic bullet. You have to keep experimenting. You
have to keep researching. You have to go one small step at a time.

Things have gotten better in recent years. And I don't think journalism has
led the public; I think it's the other way around. Honest people can differ
about this, but this business of the press turning people against the
Vietnam War...people didn't question the war until Johnny down the street
came back in a flag-draped casket. Until that happened in every
neighborhood, it was easy to see the war as something happening "over
there." Maybe the same thing is happening in the Drug War. As long as
people could believe it was confined to the wrong side of the tracks or the
elite that had money to buy fancy drugs, it was easy to say, "Whatever the
police and government say is all right with me." But when Drug War
casualties began to mount in the suburbs, people's eyes began to open.

JOHN TIMONEY - POLICE COMMISSIONER OF THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA

Right now, the extremes govern policy. For example, the crack epidemic in
the late Eighties was a big concern, but politicians overreacted by
creating this difference between crack cocaine and powder cocaine. Without
a doubt, you feel bad when you send people to prison who need treatment.
But very few people in jail are there for first-time possession. The ones
who are particularly affected by drugs are the minority communities. We get
a lot of pressure to clean up neighborhoods where there are four or five
drug dealers on the block. But then we also hear another cry: You're
incarcerating a whole generation, giving up on too many people. Some
members of the minority community may see an effort toward drug
legalization as whites trying to continue genocide through drugs in the
black community. The important thing is that you need to make sure the
minority community is involved in this discussion.

ORRIN HATCH - U.S. SENATOR, UTAH (REPUBLICAN)

I don't think there's any law that can prevent a teenager from taking that
first puff of a marijuana cigarette, that first sniff of cocaine. If I knew
what it was, I would dedicate my career to passing it. But we need more
education. When you have a young person who has experimented, you know how
fast they can get in trouble on methamphetamine. We have to get some
treatment for them. We haven't concentrated as we should on first-time
offenders. They can get drugs in jails, but there's no real education in
the jails, and no treatment.

Keep in mind, treatment alone won't do it. Enforcement alone won't do it.
Education alone won't do it.

We have to reduce both the demand for and the supply of drugs. The movie
Traffic drives home the point that law enforcement alone won't solve the
problem. And a lot of people have had to face the fact that their own
children have experienced drugs. First-time use of drugs has gone way up.
If you look at Ecstasy alone, use by tenth- and twelfth-graders is up
sharply. A huge portion of those who used heroin for the first time last
year were under eighteen. Like anything else, back in the 1980s, we thought
we were right. There were too many judges being too permissive. But I do
think it's time to re-evaluate and look for the injustice. And where
there's injustice, correct it. The sentencing laws have worked to a large
degree because people aren't being treated with disparity now the way they
were. So there was a need for uniform standards for judges. But we've seen
some flaws and some intractability. I think marijuana is a gateway drug;
nobody can deny that. And I get furious when I hear people say it's
harmless. This is not the same marijuana that was used in the Sixties and
Seventies. Potency is way up. We know that if you stop a kid from even
smoking before twenty-one, they'll probably never touch drugs. If they
start on marijuana, there's a high propensity to go on to harder drugs.

BERNARD C. PARKS - CHIEF OF POLICE, LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT

It's a failed policy to call anything a war when you're addressing issues
in the community - when you declare war on your own community. There are
many sides to address - the supply-and-demand side, prevention,
intervention, rehabilitation, enforcement. The hardest thing for most
people to do is hold themselves responsible and show strength of will and
character. In order for addicts to change, there must be some reward that
forces them to do what they need to do, a lever to hold them to
accountability. It's hard to take crime out of the drug equation. The
Department of Justice has done forecasting figures - random drug tests on
people arrested on non-narcotic charges. Seventy to eighty percent of them
had drugs in their system. In the city of L.A., drugs are intertwined with
many of our crimes.

Our financing goes to the most sexy part: arresting people. It's not as
sexy to put money into prevention and education. We need more K-12
education, and when we see early uses of gateway drugs - alcohol,
cigarettes, marijuana - we need to intervene and double our educational
efforts. We need to make the penalties for using and selling unattractive
to people. Right now, people are going into custody as addicts and coming
out as addicts. People also get out of jail and have no supervision. We
have to have rehabilitation. We need a broader strategy focusing on
education and health. It's not just about capturing seventeen tons of drugs
a year. We know that if there's no demand for drugs, there's no market.
We're still trying to figure out what the impact of Proposition 36 will be.

Proposition 36 views drug use as a singular crime or event when, often, it
is interrelated with other crimes - auto theft, for example. Many of our
bank robbers are doing it to fulfill their drug needs. If people have the
ability to beat their drug habit, they do it. But without a hammer hanging
over their head, they don't. We're going to give them one or two chances
without the hammer. If you look at the records, most people we arrest are
not just into marijuana, but a myriad of things. That's common. Look at Al
Capone. They got him not on murder but on taxes.

ASA HUTCHINSON - U.S. REPRESENTATIVE, ARKANSAS (REPUBLICAN) NOMINEE,
ADMINISTRATOR OF THE DRUG ENFORCEMENT ADMINISTRATION

The War on Drugs has been successful in terms of individual lives saved and
the billions of young people who have declined to use drugs. We're sending
the right message to kids: Drugs are very bad, they're illegal, and don't
experiment or use them. That must be articulated in a way kids understand.

We have to concentrate on high-level dealers. We need to show that we're
not simply trying to put nonviolent users in jail. One way to do this, for
example, is drug courts. I'm a strong advocate of drug courts - the threat
of prison with long-term rehabilitation. As a member of Congress - and I
will continue this if I get the opportunity to head the DEA - I've
supported steps to prevent racial profiling. We also need to diminish
sentencing guidelines between crack cocaine and powder cocaine. Currently
you get a five-year sentence for 500 grams of powder, but only five grams
of crack lands you the same prison time. Marijuana can be a used as a
gateway drug, and I believe that has been shown anecdotally and
statistically. The current move toward legalization of drugs such as
marijuana is harmful and sends the wrong message to young people.

BARNEY FRANK - U.S. REPRESENTATIVE, MASSACHUSETTS (DEMOCRAT)

Getting high on marijuana means you're rebellious, while getting drunk on
beer means you're a good old boy. But ask any cop whether he'd rather go
into a house full of people high on marijuana or one full of people drunk
on beer. They'll tell you they'd much rather deal with people on marijuana.

I introduced legislation in the Massachusetts legislature to legalize
marijuana twenty-five years ago. I currently have two bills on the subject.
One would change the penalties for people currently in prison on marijuana
charges - we ought to be letting them out, except in the most egregious
cases. The other would permit medical marijuana. Of course medical
marijuana ought to be legal. A lot of my friends on the left think that the
public is on our side and it's always the politicians who are blocking
everything good. I don't happen to think that's true. I don't think the
public is as far left as some of my friends do. But on drug policy, the
public is ahead of the politicians. You see it in the referenda [on medical
marijuana]. The public is actually more sensible. The politicians are all
afraid of being tagged "soft on drugs."

We need to stop the prosecution of users and low-level dealing of a bag or
two. I would certainly make the use of marijuana not a crime, but I
wouldn't change the rules on large-scale distribution.

GARY JOHNSON - GOVERNOR OF NEW MEXICO

I am forty-eight. I smoked pot when I was younger. I didn't get screwed up
on pot, and I didn't know anybody who did. The reason I talk about
legalization is, somebody has to sell people their drugs. You ask a room of
a thousand people if you think you should go to jail for smoking pot.
Nobody's hand goes up. Ask how many think you should go to jail for selling
a small amount; a few hands go up. Ask how many think someone selling a lot
of pot should go to prison, and a lot of hands go up. And I always say,
"That's hypocrisy."

The two major criticisms of legalizing marijuana are: You're sending the
wrong message to kids, and, use will go up. My problem is, we're measuring
success on use. We should toss that out. If you or I read tomorrow that
alcohol use was up by three percent, we wouldn't care. We understand that
use goes up or down. What we care about is, is DWI up or down? Is incidence
of violence up or down? Are alcohol-related diseases up or down? Those same
rules ought to apply to drugs. We ought to be concerned about violent
crime, hepatitis C, HIV, turf warfare among drug gangs and nonviolent users
behind bars. Those are all distinct harms caused by drugs under our current
policy.

If I were the dictator - and I'm not - and I had to set up a distribution
system for marijuana tomorrow, it would be similar to liquor. I'd allow
sales at liquor establishments. People say, "There will be bootleg pot."
And there probably would be for a little while. But then it would die out.
Why would you buy bathtub gin when you can buy Tanqueray?

The idea of a drug pusher is a myth. Most drug transactions are buyers
seeking sellers. When I talk about legalization of other drugs, I adopt the
term "harm reduction." What we're really after is reduction of the harms
that drugs - and drug policy - do. If we can move from a criminal model to
a medical model, we'll be going a long way.

I was elected in 1994, and I have been re-elected but cannot run for a
third term under our term-limits law. People talk about being courageous.
I'm living evidence of why term limits should be in effect. Would I have
brought this issue out if I thought I could be elected to a third term? I
don't know. I raised the legalization issue after my re-election. In the
first term, I talked about the failure of the Drug War and that arresting
people isn't going to work. But it wasn't until the second term that I made
a conscious decision to turn up the volume and search out some solutions.

LORETTA SANCHEZ - U.S. REPRESENTATIVE, CALIFORNIA (DEMOCRAT)

When I was growing up, my youngest uncle was a heroin addict. I saw
directly for about ten years the effect of that addiction: It manifested
itself in his inability to hold a job; he was sent over and over to the
California state penitentiary system, sometimes for heroin use, most of the
time for armed robbery or breaking and entering; he would commit crimes to
get money; he would go for a stint to prison, get as clean as you can get
in that situation. He would write me a letter every two weeks, he would get
out, then the problem was how to get a job, so he would end up using again.
When I was eighteen, my mother and grandmother had to go to San Francisco
and ID his body - he was found in a hotel room with a bullet between his eyes.

For every person we're putting into a drug court who gets diverted into
drug treatment, there's got to be thirty who go straight to prison. What
are they learning there? They are co-habitating with people who are
hardened criminals and drug users. It would be much better if we did more
of these drug courts, where you get a second chance.

HENRY A. WAXMAN - U.S. REPRESENTATIVE, CALIFORNIA (DEMOCRAT)

We've always put the emphasis on the supply side when we ought to put the
emphasis on the demand side. We ought to be making treatment available to
anyone who wants it, to get a handle on addiction. That's clear. If you
look at the voters in California, they were pretty clear [on Proposition
36]. They'd rather have people go to treatment than to a jail cell. How
much longer can we keep warehousing people? It's not doing any good, and
you can argue it's doing considerable harm. I'm not sure the debate is
really opening up. I'm not sure "everybody" is saying the Drug War is a
failure and we ought to be doing more treatment and education than
enforcement. I've always been against mandatory minimums, for example.
Judges should have the discretion to decide each individual case on its
merits. But you have to look at the people in control of the committees in
the Congress. Maybe Hatch is saying some new things right now about drug
treatment over incarceration. But he's the chair of the Judiciary Committee
in the Senate, and if he believes these things, he could do something about it.

DAVE MATTHEWS - MUSICIAN

If you look at the generations that came before, I don't think youth have
become more wild. Maybe they're more armed now, but young people have
always been adventurous. We say that our young people shouldn't be using
drugs, so we give them a little speech about how they'll become worse
people, we give them some sort of minimalist education, and then we punish
them for experimenting. We don't fix the problem - all we do is increase
the problem. It turns the slight, adventurous recklessness of youth into
criminal behavior. It's like we're manufacturing criminals. Whoever came up
with the idea of restricting financial aid for drug offenses? He needs to
be in prison.

At this point - and I don't want to be too cynical - the financial gain
from building prisons has become what keeps the Drug War going. It's the
one thing in America right now that I just find offensive. And in this
climate, there's no limit to how violated our rights to privacy can be.
When you live in a country that has insane laws like America's drug laws,
then it is hard to argue for our privacy rights and our civil rights,
because with the laws the way they are, we don't have any rights. I mean,
if I get caught with a bag of pot, then, "You're going downtown, baby" -
what kind of madness is that? If we're in an environment where that sort of
crazy behavior is tolerated, test the mailman and see if he's been smoking
pot on the weekend, or make the kid who's walking your dog take a urine
test to make sure he's not high while he's watching Bingo poop on the lawn.

If the Drug War was halted tomorrow morning, the drug use in this country
would not change a bit. The only thing that would change is that people
would stop getting their heads blown off in the street trying to get their
smack on the corner. There are so many arguments for stopping the Drug War
and very few for keeping it going. It's just a distraction from real
problems in the world. You know, hunger and bad education fall to the
wayside when you have to deal with this imaginary plague that's destroying
our country.

CARL HIAASEN - NOVELIST AND COLUMNIST

One of the first novels I wrote was Powder Burn, about the Colombians
moving into the cocaine trade in south Florida. The bloodshed in those days
was quite spectacular. This is in '79, '80, '81, and the only change in all
that time is they've become a lot more considered about where and when they
kill each other. It's done less publicly now. But the basic elements of the
drug trade haven't changed. Every day there's another freighter from Haiti
busted and there are tons and tons of cocaine in the hold. The irony is,
the price of a kilo on the street isn't much different than it was ten
years ago. That tells you there is plenty of supply and plenty of demand.
Lots and lots of people in jail, and the only difference is they're
different people than they were back then. Or maybe not, actually.

I live in the Keys, which has been a smuggler's paradise forever. Many of
the people I know here who are legitimate fishing guides and businessmen
now were in the smuggling business once. Quite a few spent time in jail.
Did it stop the smuggling? No. When I moved to the Keys from Fort
Lauderdale in 1993, they took down the entire Coast Guard station at Isla
Morada. The Coasties were seizing drugs and then selling them. They were
running a cocaine operation out of the Coast Guard station.

In 1983 and '84, I spent some time riding around with DEA street agents
when I was writing for the Miami Herald. They weren't cowboys. They were
pretty smart guys. They had a pick of deals they could be doing. Cocaine
one day, heroin the next, marijuana the day after that. Every day, they
were throwing people in the can. And, to a person, every one thought he was
on the right side but making no difference at all.

I remember once, up by Homestead, they had a deal for a tractor-trailer
full of marijuana, and the deal is going on in a Holiday Inn somewhere, and
I'm sitting in a car with a DEA guy. Drug dealers are the most hapless
people. They're always late, always fucking up. And we're waiting for the
call to go rushing in and bust everybody. Two kids ride by on their bikes.
They don't see us because of our tinted windows. One pulls out a joint and
lights it up, right in front of a DEA agent. The agent just laughs and
says, "You see how we're not going to stop this?" Now we're fifteen years
later, and it's just as easy to get whatever you want.

I've seen whole neighborhoods destroyed by crack cocaine, and it's
terrible. The question is, Would it be better or worse if it wasn't
illegal? Would there be less killing? It's something worth considering. The
same conservative pinheads who trot out their actuarial tables on lives
saved per dollar spent on environmental regulations ought to be doing the
same calculations on what it costs to lock up thousands and thousands of
people - locking up Dad and sending Mom to the welfare office.

SCOTT WEILAND - MUSICIAN

Prison isn't appropriate for drug users, if you're nonviolent. If you're a
junkie or a crackhead or whatever, and do an armed robbery and someone gets
injured, it's not nonviolent anymore. You could've made the decision to go
on Santa Monica Boulevard and suck cock. That's what I would do rather than
hold a bank up. You don't throw people in prison because they suffer from
bipolar disorder, or a personality disorder, or any of those mental
deficiencies. And there's no difference, really. If somebody has narcolepsy
and falls asleep at the wheel, they're not going to go to prison for it.

One of the worst problems with drug offenders going to prison is the
mandatory minimums. That's really where you see how it's pointed toward
people of color and people who don't have money. There are people doing
longer prison sentences for drugs in some states than the people doing time
for murder. I know there are some experimental programs in Europe where you
are a government-sanctioned heroin addict, and you register as you do a
person on methadone. I don't think legalizing drugs is going to create more
addicts. It might inspire more people to try it out, but not everyone's
geared for that. Alcohol is legal, and most people aren't alcoholics.

NORM STAMPER - CHIEF OF POLICE, SEATTLE, 1994-2000

I've been a lawman thirty-four years. I think our national drug strategy
that has spanned both Democratic and Republican administrations has been a
total failure. I have no problem with spending time, money and imagination
in attempting to interdict drug trafficking and those making obscene
amounts of money trading illicit drugs. Those people rank, in my
estimation, pretty damn low on the scale of social legitimacy. But dealers
are there for reasons that anyone in a capitalist society ought to
understand. There is a huge demand for illegal drugs, and as individuals
who are also armed want to expand their share of the market, we wind up
with a whole lot of cops, dealers and innocent citizens finding themselves
literally in the line of fire.

If I were king for a day and was going to learn from history, I would, in
fact, decriminalize drug possession. Legalization is a different concept.
Decriminalization acknowledges the fact that we set out to criminalize
certain types of behavior, most notably during Prohibition, and we found
that was an abysmal failure. We decriminalized the possession of booze. We
criminalized other substances and demonized those who use them and, in the
process, created an outlaw class that includes everybody from a senator's
wife to the addict curled up in a storefront doorway.

I'd use regulation and taxation of these drugs, much as we do with alcohol
and tobacco, to finance prevention, education and treatment programs. I
can't think of a stronger indictment of our current system than that there
are addicts who don't want to be addicts queuing up for treatment and can't
get it because we're spending too much money on enforcement and
interdiction. I would regulate, and I would tax, and I would stiffen
penalties for those selling to minors or those who hurt another person
while under the influence. And that includes driving under the influence.

We've pursued this terrible policy because we've attached huge moral import
to this issue: that it's immoral to think about decriminalization. That
it's immoral to think about the government regulating everything from
production to distribution. Any politician or police official who speaks
out for a sane course of action is seen as soft on crime, and demonized as
well. It's not an easy sell to talk to an African-American mom who has
three or four children, some of them teenagers, about decriminalization
when she's doing all she can to keep her kids out of drugs.

I was careful when I was police chief, but I've been saying these things
for years. I did suggest that our fear is keeping us from having a
conversation. American businesses, perhaps more than anyone else in
society, are among the first to raise the question. And I've heard it
raised bluntly: Isn't this insane, this policy we're pursuing? The number
of men and women in prison is truly staggering compared with twenty or
twenty-five years ago. That ought to tell us something.

The biggest obstacle to a saner drug policy is that the current one has
become so rigid and unassailable in the circles in which it must be
discussed flexibly and intelligently and with open minds. It's a religion.
We've accepted on faith that if what we're doing isn't working, let's do
more of it. [Former LAPD chief] Daryl Gates addressed a police chiefs'
conference in Washington some years ago, and he made a statement that "one
thing we're not going to talk about is decriminalization." There's
something wrong with talking about it. To start entertaining doubts is a
scary thing.

ERIC STERLING - PRESIDENT, THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE POLICY FOUNDATION

In January I spoke at the Drug Policy Forum of Hawaii, a very successful
group that got the state legislature to pass a medical-marijuana bill with
the governor's support. I asked for shows of hands: "How many of you think
the War on Drugs is wrong?" Everybody raised his hand. I asked, "How many
of you came to this opinion in the last year or two?" Nobody raised his
hand. I asked, "How many of you think there is a coherent strategy for
achieving drug-policy reform?" Almost nobody raised his hand. I asked, "Who
are the critical people to reach?" and somebody said, "Young people." I
said, "Young people don't vote." Someone else said, "Poor people." I
pointed out that they have the least political power.

Instead of preaching to the choir, we need to arrange discussions before
chambers of commerce and Wall Street interests - the people who have the
Republican Party's ear - and explain how this affects the national bottom
line. You're not going to move the Republican Party until you move them.

Then you have to reach out to labor and teachers and point out how the War
on Drugs is inconsistent with the ideals of the labor movement - how it
hurts working people, how it damages schools, how it undermines education.
You're not going to move the Democratic Party until you move them.

That scene in Traffic on the airplane, where the drug czar asks for new
ideas and there is an embarrassed silence, is mirrored by the unembarrassed
silence from this White House, which, two months in, hadn't named a new
drug czar or announced a new policy. This administration has nothing to say
on the subject of drugs. The fact that the position went unfilled says
something about the position's ultimate emptiness, and perhaps even about
the problem's paper-tiger quality. We say "the great drug crisis," but
perhaps drugs are just a part of other real crises, such as child abuse,
poverty, despair.

Drugs are more available, cheaper and more pure than ever. We still fail to
treat the majority of drug addicts. Drug use among eighth-graders went up
in the 1990s. High school seniors say heroin and marijuana are more
available than ever. And the death rate from drugs has nearly doubled in
the Nineties, from 3.2 to 6.3 per hundred thousand. Seventeen thousand
deaths last year, from 7,000 in 1990.

People look at Proposition 36 in California and say, "Aha, there's a whole
treatment-instead-of-incarceration paradigm shift." I don't think that's
very profound. Lip service about treatment has been around for decades.
Treatment is being advanced in the context of drug courts, and that's
nothing new. When I first started practicing law in 1976, what you'd do for
your drug-addicted clients was get them into treatment.

What would be a paradigm shift is a police commissioner saying he's not
going to arrest people for possession of drugs. A prosecutor announcing she
wasn't going to take drug-possession cases to court. A president commuting
the sentences of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders. A legislature
willing to decriminalize marijuana, refusing to have arrested those
possessing marijuana or growing it in their own home. A superintendent of
schools who allows teachers to talk to their students about their own drug
experiences in honest discussions about drug use to prevent drug abuse. It
would be a shift to give incentives to drug users to turn in dealers who
sell adulterated drugs, to help drug users test their drugs for safety. To
treat drug users as our children and accept that making it safer to be a
drug user is in the public interest. It would be a shift to include drug
users, not just recovered addicts, in the making of drug policy. What we do
now is like making policy toward Indians and only allowing into the process
those Indians who were members of Christian churches and have renounced
Native language and Native ways.

DAVID CROSBY - MUSICIAN

When I was in prison, probably eighty-five percent of the people were there
for drugs in one way or another. Either they got caught with drugs, or they
got caught selling drugs, or they got caught doing something while they
were on drugs, or they got caught doing something terrible for the money to
get drugs. So I don't think prison is a valid solution for any kind of drug
use or addiction - either one. Addiction is a very tough thing; I've been
addicted, and I know what it's like. It requires a lot of treatment -
long-term treatment - a lot more treatment than the insurance providers are
willing to offer.

I think they should just legalize marijuana. Put it this way - they sell
liquor in every corner store in the United States. And booze is much worse
for you than marijuana. Much worse. Drastically worse. Orders of magnitude
worse. So it doesn't make any sense - they should just legalize it.

Personally, I think we should send some very serious lads from the Army
down to the fields where coca is being grown. You've got to understand that
we know where all the coca plants are in the Western Hemisphere because all
plants have different infrared signatures, and our satellites can locate
exactly where they are. We also know, in the four countries where these
plants are, what soil and what altitude they're in. We know all that. So
send somebody down, take it out of the ground and say, "Look: Plant coffee;
we'll buy it directly from you, we'll pay you three times as much because
we won't go through a middleman, and you'll be fine. Plant coca again, and
we'll be back again next year and somebody will get hurt. This is not all
right anymore. Game over. Too many lives ruined, too many families
shredded, too much wreckage. We're going to take it seriously now."

[continued in Part 2 at http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n1388/a01.html ]