SHOOT-DOWN FALLOUT

The mistaken shoot-down by Peru of a light plane carrying American
missionaries adds two more lives to the vast ocean of lives taken by
Colombian drug traffickers. If this tragic mistake is a watershed event, it
is not because the shoot-down policy failed or derogates international law.
In fact, it reduced drug trafficking between Peru and Colombia dramatically
in its first two years, encouraged Peruvian coca growers to switch to
legitimate crops, and cut coca production in Peru by an incontrovertible 47
percent. The watershed is somewhat different. This tragedy points up the
ever-widening circles of innocent life lost while Colombian drug traffickers
remain at large.

Great sadness attends tragic mistakes that result in loss of innocent life
but that is precisely what Colombian drug traffickers do every day. They
steal away innocent lives. They rob from innocents across this hemisphere,
especially the United States, the very promise of life. Last year, more than
15,000 young Americans died at the hands of drug overdoses, many involving
Colombian heroin and cocaine. The coca base for this cocaine is often
produced in Peru.

Make no mistake: Ultimate responsibility for this friendly fire accident
lies with the unrepentant drug lords who are the unambiguous first cause of
the Peruvian shoot-down policy. If they did not traffic coca base in great
quantities over the exact flight path of this light plane in nearly
identical airframes, consumed by trafficking wealth and utterly indifferent
to the countless young lives they steal, this event would never have
happened.

Note, too, that the U.S. Customs Service is a saving grace for nations
seeking to preserve civil society against the onslaught of powerful drug
traffickers. Under a time-tested process of intelligence sharing by U.S.
Customs, we provided timely and accurate data on a suspected trafficking
planes profile. The Peruvians summoned two antiquated airframes to track the
profile of a drug trafficking plane on a typical trafficking flight path. If
they followed international legal protocol, which they claim to have done,
they were within their rights to force this plane down.

Three specific points need making in the dumbest silence that follows this
mistake. First, caution and the law are always first priority. There are
rules for engaging a foreign plane and even for engaging a drug traffickers
plane in Peruvian airspace. The investigation that is under way should zero
in on whether these rules were, in fact, followed by the Peruvian pilots.

Assuming they were, the need for greater cooperation within this hemisphere
to reverse recent drug trends, shut down Colombia traffickers, bring Mexican
cartels to justice, and seriously review U.S. commitments to those who need
our assistance should be front and center. This event reminds us that our
neighbors are at war, and that we have a real responsibility to help.

Second, with this jarring event should come a flash-back to the value of
teaching our own culture that drugs and flirtation with such concepts as
legalization are dangerous. We do not have the luxury of treating a
generation or two as expendable, or treating federally supported drug
prevention as merely optional. These choices are upon us, no less than the
Peruvian choice to save their nation by shoot-down. We should fully fund
efforts like the Office of National Drug Controls hard-hitting Media
Campaign (which leverages private support for effective media advertising
through the non-profit Partnership for a Drug-Free America), widely heralded
National Guard drug prevention programs, D.A. America, the National
Institute on Drug Abuse, Safe and Drug Free Schools and the Drug-Free
Communities Act, as well as non-profit leaders like the National Alliance
for Model State Drug Laws. These programs and prevention more generally
work, if they are properly and consistent supported.

We can no longer avert our gaze from the hard task of educating our young
about the damage done to body, mind and soul by drugs, and as in this
instance knowledge about how they get here, and how intense the struggle is
in places like Peru to stop them. If American teens did not use the cocaine
that fuels the coca paste flights, there would be no Peruvian shoot-down
policy, and no tragedies of this kind.

Third, this is just the first verse of the first chapter of the first volume
of a stark reality that will increasingly confront this White House.
President Bush can not escape the dark shadow cast across competing domestic
and international priorities by the thousand-pound guerrilla of drug policy.
It is a challenge that will play into the rest of the Bush policy agenda as
it did in the midst of the Americas Summit just as surely as Plato's cave
wall caught shadows of a larger reality. In education, health care, domestic
violence, personal and property crime, labor productivity, national
security, terrorism, and even economic growth, the ugly drug war shadow
appears. That realization, made vivid by this tragic episode, may perhaps
reinforce the urgency of a strong, vocal and proactive role on U.S. drug
policy by the White House.

No president has been better prepared to tackle this issue. On the other
hand, the massive task ahead of this president is daunting. For no past
president has the confluence of possible drug war surprises international,
border-related, law enforcement-driven, prevention- and family-focused and
treatment-tied been more likely to play a major role in the success or
failure of his agenda.

In the end, what the incident in Peru teaches us is that this hemisphere,
and our society particularly, cannot afford to look away. We must recommit
ourselves to stopping the loss of life that stems whether by teen-age
overdose or friendly fire shoot-down from an absence of community and
national leadership on an issue dear to every parent and most Americans.