GOING ON A BAD TRIP

It doesn't take much anymore to demonstrate the idiocy, waste and
immorality of the government's 30-year war on (some) drugs.

Just watching "Traffic" -- a much better than average Hollywood
message-movie -- is enough.

But "Traffic" never takes us to bloody Colombia, which supplies more
than two-thirds of America's cocaine, and which Rolling Stone warns
in a piece called "The Great American Quagmire" may soon become our
next Vietnam.

Colombia's civil war, as New York Times writer Tina Rosenberg
explains in the April 12 issue of Rolling Stone, is essentially a
high-stakes turf war between the world's nastiest drug gangs. Instead
of the Bloods and Cripps shooting it out on the corner, however,
Colombia has armies of Marxist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary
fighting in the jungle.

Both are fighting each other and/or the government over control of
Colombia's coca fields, which provide them with all the money they
need to continue terrorizing and massacring the innocent civilians
caught in the middle.

But never fear. America's drug warriors -- who at home can't stop
heroin from making it to the lockers of suburban high schools -- have
come to Colombia's rescue with "Plan Colombia."

It sounds like a venerable mutual fund. But it is really $1.3 billion
worth of U.S. helicopters, training and several hundred non-uniformed
advisors who are being sent to help Colombia's hapless government
wipe out the coca plants and cocaine labs.

"Cocaine Chaos," in the final issue of George, offers an up-close
tour of the coca farms and drug labs of backwater Colombia. It too
comes to the only conclusion a drug-unimpaired mind can come to: Plan
Colombia is going to be one big waste of $1.3 billion.

True, the money is a drop in the federal bucket. But as Rosenberg
points out, no one in America -- including the chicken politicians of
both parties who approved Plan Colombia almost unanimously lest they
be accused of being soft on drugs -- thinks it'll work. (First clue:
Colombia is bigger than Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma combined.)

Even if it does work, however, the coca fields and labs will move
back to Peru and Bolivia, where most of them used to be a few years
ago until they were "successfully" chased out with American help.

Plan Colombia is essentially an overseas application of American
anti-narcotic policies that have failed at home, a point which,
though never made, is implicit in World Press Review's April cover
package on the global drug scene, "Futile Fire: On the Drug War's
Front Lines."

Drawn from newspapers and magazines in France, Canada, Mexico,
Colombia, Scotland, Italy and Hong Kong, the articles show the war on
(some) drugs has become a World War from Mexico to China.

A LeMonde article on Plan Colombia agrees with Rolling Stone's
skeptical pessimism. The Gazette of Montreal also sees another
Vietnam coming in Colombia.

A Mexico City newsmagazine argues Mexico is doing its best to thwart
drug trafficking but that it is a victim of "Human weakness:
compulsion, evasion, the search for instant gratification." That's
one way of describing the universal desire/need for humans to alter
their own consciousness.

Reading these articles isn't as exciting as watching "Traffic." But
they prove one thing: The demand for drugs is not a flaw unique to
the American character. It's global and no country, even
near-totalitarian ones like China, is able to keep the supply from
getting in to satisfy it.

Bill Steigerwald is an associate editor and writer at the Pittsburgh
Tribune-Review. He has written a weekly column about magazines for
the Los Angeles Times, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Trib since
1987.