ATTACK ON DRUG CROPS A FAILURE FOR CENTURIES

In the 16th century, the Marques de Caete, the Spanish viceroy of Peru, was
bothered by the extent to which Indians were chewing coca leaves, a
practice that delivers a small amount of the same drug users take when they
snort cocaine today.

The Marques ordered a limit to the amount of coca that could be planted. He
even set up financial incentives to get farmers to substitute food crops
for coca. It didn't work. Coca was too much in demand, too lucrative.

Not even the power of the viceroy could stifle the power of the market.
Still, the idea that drug problems can be solved by eradicating the source
plants is so simple and powerful that it survived the Marques' failure and
many others like it.

Today, international anti-drug efforts are increasingly targeting source
plants in the field. The elegant cannabis plant that becomes marijuana and
hashish; the squat coca bush, whose leaves produce cocaine, and the gangly
opium poppy, whose sap becomes opium and heroin--these plants are
international criminals, the targets of one of the greatest law-enforcement
efforts in history.

The United States and the United Nations are spending billions of dollars
trying to destroy them. Third World nations are adding major contributions
from their slim budgets. The economies of whole regions, even whole
countries, are at stake. Supporters, especially the U.S. government, insist
these efforts can work with enough resources and cooperation. The UN has
set a target date for the total eradication of coca, opium poppy and
marijuana: 2008.

This isn't the first time the UN has set a target date for the end of drug
production: In 1961, the UN said coca and opium poppy would be wiped out
worldwide by 1986.

Crop-eradication programs, say the critics, have been tried and failed
repeatedly and will always fail. Worse, they say, the attack on source
plants wastes resources that could go to treatment and development,
devastates eco-systems, destabilizes societies and spreads the violence and
corruption of illegal trafficking from country to country.

The argument could be said to be between the "cops" and the "economists."
The "cops" favor going after source plants in the field. In some cases,
that means uprooting the plants one by one. More often, it involves sending
helicopters and aircraft to spray herbicides, a method capable of
destroying hundreds of hectares of coca, opium poppy or marijuana in an
afternoon.

For the United States, this has been policy for decades. In the 1970s, it
became a major effort, made notorious when President Jimmy Carter's order
to spray Mexican marijuana fields resulted not in the eradication of the
marijuana trade but the delivery of poisoned marijuana to Americans.

Today, crop eradication is central to U.S. counternarcotics thinking. But
though eradication programs have destroyed huge crops of drug-producing
plants, these losses always have been quickly and easily replaced
elsewhere. Colombia's Operation Splendor is a typical example.

In 1994, the Colombian government of Ernesto Samper, caught in a corruption
scandal and struggling to return to the good graces of the United States,
announced that it would eradicate the country's entire coca and poppy crop
within two years. The Americans kicked in planes, helicopters and
herbicide. Tens of thousands of hectares of drug crops were destroyed.

But just as swiftly, every hectare was replaced, and then some: Colombia's
net production of coca and opium poppy exploded even while spraying was at
its most intense. The U.S. and Colombian governments responded to this
failure with even more vigorous eradication efforts. Did they work?

A State Department report released last March declared the latest
eradication efforts a success. But a 1999 report from the General
Accounting Office paints a bleaker picture: Despite two years of extensive
herbicide spraying, the GAO said there has not been any net reduction in
coca cultivation.

In fact, Colombia, which grew very little coca in the early 1990s, is now
by far the world's largest coca cultivator.

The critics of the "cops" are the "economists." They say there's an obvious
reason why eradication efforts have failed and always will: the law of
supply and demand. Wiping out supply leaves demand unsatisfied. Unsatisfied
demand causes rising prices. Rising prices cause more people to produce supply.

Thus, squeezing production in one place causes it to expand elsewhere (the
balloon effect). Examples abound. When opium poppy-growing went down in
Pakistan, it surged in Afghanistan. Poppy went down in Thailand and Mexico,
and up in Burma and Laos. Marijuana was suppressed in Mexico, so it shot up
in Colombia. When it dropped there, it went up in the United States. Coca
plummeted in Peru and Bolivia and soared in Colombia.

"As long as there is demand in the United States and Europe," says Jaime
Ruiz, senior adviser to the Colombian president, "there is going to be
supply. If it is not from Colombia, it is going to be from somewhere else."

Still, some "cops" defend crop eradication by pointing to the linchpin of
the economists' argument: prices. Rising prices at the production level may
spur more production, the cops argue, but they also mean rising prices for
the consumer. And higher prices discourage people from using drugs, which
is the point of the exercise.

In fact, rising prices at the production level typically don't result in
higher street-level prices for drugs. As Peter Reuter, a professor at the
University of Maryland, explained in the New York Times, it costs cocaine
refiners only 30 cents to purchase the coca leaf needed to produce a gram
of cocaine, which sells for about $150 in the United States. Even if the
price of the leaves doubled, the change in retail price would be negligible.

And even that assumes that any increase in production cost would be passed
on to the ultimate consumer, which need not happen since the traffickers
have such a huge profit margin to start with. A 1994 report commissioned by
the U.S. government from RAND, the American public-policy institution,
found that in reducing cocaine use, treatment of heavy cocaine users is 10
times more cost-efficient than interdicting smuggled drugs and 23 times
more cost-efficient than crop eradication.

These results suggest, the report concludes, that if an additional dollar
is going to be spent on drug control, it should be spent on treatment, not
on a supply-control program. But far from heeding this advice, the "cops"
instead developed a more sophisticated mode of crop eradication.
Acknowledging that the "balloon effect" is real, the new approach combines
eradication with development aid, to give farmers positive economic
incentives to abandon drugs and grow legal crops. But getting farmers to
switch from drug crops is a tough sell.

In rural Colombia, where bare subsistence is the economic norm, a farmer
can make $500 a month per hectare of coca; legal crops would do well to
fetch half that. An even bigger barrier to getting farmers to switch crops
is a lack of basic infrastructure. Many drug-growing farmers live in areas
so isolated they have no roads linking them to markets, or roads so poor
that crops rot on the way. But drug traffickers offer farmers door-to-door
pickup.

And drug crops are easy to grow and harvest. Coca in particular is a
farmer's dream. It can produce four harvests a year. A bush can produce for
decades. And coca thrives even in rocky or acidic soils. The UN and the
U.S. government think all these factors can be overcome, particularly
through infrastructure development. Beyond that, a U.S. State Department
official says, these folks would be offered the opportunity for government
services in the form of schools and health clinics.

Peru and Bolivia began major anti-coca efforts of this type in the 1990s.
Peru's coca cultivation is down 66 percent in the last four years (helped
in part by a fungus that attacked Peru's coca bushes). Bolivia's has fallen
55 percent in 2 1/2 years. Colombia's coca production rose rapidly at the
same time, but not as much as these drops, meaning there was a net
reduction in the total amount of coca grown. Or so the authorities thought.

Further analysis showed that Colombian cocaine productivity was 2 1/2 times
higher than previously believed. It's impossible to say for how long the
United States has been underestimating South American cocaine production.
Once the 1998 and 1999 figures for Colombia were adjusted accordingly, the
major drop in cocaine production vanished.

Instead, the decrease was only marginal. Undeterred, the U.S. government
argues that Peru and Bolivia still prove crop replacement works. Many are
deeply skeptical. Ricardo Vargas, a Colombian sociologist who studies the
drug trade, insists that even if the government succeeds in scrapping
traffickers' supply, they'll just set up somewhere else.

In fact, there are signs that gains in Peru and Bolivia already are being
lost. Prices for coca are steadily rising, tempting farmers to return to
the business. Traffickers have started refining cocaine in Peru itself, and
opium poppy, which had been little in evidence in the country, is expanding.

U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey told Congress last fall that in Peru, the
drug-control situation is deteriorating.

Even if the United States, the UN and local governments managed the huge
task of pushing coca production down and keeping it down across South
America, there's little to keep it from popping up anyplace else in the world.

The move from shipping drugs to producing drugs wouldn't be difficult for
some. Albanian gangs recently have attempted to grow coca in the Albanian
countryside. In the late 19th century, coca was grown commercially in Sri
Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, Iwo Jima and Nigeria. At the beginning
of the 20th century, Indonesia exported more coca leaf than Peru.

What's to prevent drug traffickers from starting coca production in a
large, unstable, corrupt country such as Nigeria or Indonesia? The State
Department official responds there's no reason for anyone else to grow it
because they'd have to compete with these very vicious trafficking
organizations to introduce it to the market.

But if coca production were suppressed in South America, it would be those
very vicious trafficking organizations that would be growing it elsewhere.
Call it the globalization of the balloon effect.

For Third World nations, whose meager budgets can ill-afford failed
schemes, the costs of crop-eradication policies are high. The dismal
failure of Operation Splendor, to take one example, cost Colombia and the
United States $300 million.

Splendor, and similar programs that followed it, also inflicted another
cost on Colombia, one quite common when crop eradication schemes are tried.
Tens of thousands of coca farmers who saw their livelihoods vanish in a
spray of herbicide felt betrayed by their government. At times, protests
grew to resemble open revolt.

According to the U.S. government, almost 800,000 hectares has been cleared
for the coca trade over the last 15 years, less than one-third of which is
now in use. As Ruiz, the senior adviser to Colombia's president, notes, the
land available in the Andes region is so vast that "you spray fields, and
you don't do anything. They just move somewhere else because they have the
territory."

Ecosystems also are afflicted on a more local level. Although the United
States is adamant that the herbicides used in spraying are environmentally
safe, their long-term effects are open to some doubt. Chemicals that
certainly are unsafe, however, are those used to process coca leaf into
cocaine.

To dodge the authorities, traffickers use small, mobile laboratories that
stay at one place in the jungle for a week or two, then move on. Since it
takes about 210 liters of gasoline (or kerosene or acetone) and 50
kilograms of cement to process just one kilo of cocaine, piles of noxious
waste are left scattered all over the processing regions.

A new anti-drug strategy is further cause for alarm. The fungus that
attacked Peruvian coca is being worked into a bio-herbicide to be dumped on
coca in other countries. The United States is pushing Colombia to apply
this bio-herbicide.

The State Department bills it as a more environmentally friendly approach,
but there's inherent danger in introducing an alien species to new ecosystems.

If at least some of the perils of crop eradication are speculative, the
benefits are entirely so. More than 400 years after the Marques de Caete
tried and failed to stop coca in the fields, there is still little reason
to think that these policies can substantially reduce drug use and the
harms associated with it.