WAR ON COCA SAPPING HEROIN EFFORTS

BOGOTA, Colombia - Washington's $1.3 billion war on Colombian cocaine
has had an unexpected consequence: It has forced the scaling back of
efforts to stop this country's flourishing heroin trade.

Strikes against poppy plantations high in the Andes have been on hold
since December because airplanes and helicopters used in aerial
eradication missions were reassigned to the U.S.-financed push
against coca crops.

U.S. officials are calling the suspension temporary. But the halt is
frustrating Colombian police and angering some U.S. lawmakers
concerned about growing heroin production here.

The world's leading cocaine producer, Colombia now exports more
heroin than Asian producers Thailand and Pakistan and supplies 70
percent of an expanding U.S. heroin market, according to the U.S.
Drug Enforcement Administration.

At a hearing in Washington last week, Rep. Benjamin Gilman, R-NY,
raised questions about the poppy suspension. He warned that "more
American youngsters caught up in the current heroin crisis here at
home will die needlessly for lack of an effective U.S. heroin
strategy directed at Colombia." DEA Administrator Donnie Marshall
said successful heroin fighting efforts in Asia and years of battling
cocaine in Colombia had unwittingly pushed Colombian traffickers into
a booming U.S. heroin market.

Colombia produces nearly 100 times as much cocaine as heroin. Cocaine
produced here accounts for about 90 percent of the U.S. market and 75
percent of the world market.

But U.S. heroin use has doubled in the past five years, while casual
cocaine use has dropped 70 percent in the past decade, according to
the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Concern about heroin could dampen the enthusiasm over what U.S.
officials are calling a successful start to coca eradication under
Washington's $1.3 billion aid package. The United States is providing
troop training and combat helicopters to escort crop dusters over
southern coca plantations that are often guarded by armed rebels.

By early February, about 62,000 acres - nearly a fifth of Colombia's
estimated coca crop - had been sprayed with chemical herbicides, U.S.
officials say.

Gen. Gustavo Socha, head of Colombia's anti-narcotics police force,
complained that the aggressive attack on coca is undercutting the war
on heroin.

Whereas his forces wiped out a record 22,700 acres of opium plants
last year, Socha says he'll be lucky to kill more than 15,000 acres
this year - a drop of more than a third.

A State Department official acknowledged that poppy eradication has
been temporarily halted because aircraft were needed in coca-growing
areas and due to bad weather. He said the program would resume by
early May.

But Col. Patino Fonseca, who coordinates Colombia's spraying, said he
had orders to halt poppy missions for "an unknown period of time."
Fonseca said last year's operations were so successful that some
heroin traffickers were forced to move into Peru.

Critics of the U.S.-backed fumigation policy say even a renewed poppy
eradication program will do little good.

"Coca, marijuana, heroin, whichever drug you try to wipe out by
spraying will result in failure," said Ricardo Vargas, a Colombian
researcher who has written a book on the country's drug policy.