DESPITE DRUG WAR, COCAINE NOW CHEAPER IN U.S.

BOGOTA - Cocaine prices in the United States have dropped and the
drug's purity increased, despite years of effort and nearly $5 billion
spent by the U.S. government to combat Colombia's drug industry, the
White House drug czar acknowledged in a letter to a key senator.

Drug Control Policy director John Walters wrote Republican Senator
Charles Grassley that retail cocaine prices fell by 11 per cent from
February 2005 to October 2006, to about $135 U.S. per gram of pure
cocaine -- hovering near the same levels since the early 1990s.

In 1981, when the U.S. government began collecting data, a gram of
pure cocaine fetched $600.

The purity of this cocaine, meanwhile, has "trended somewhat toward
former levels," as well, Mr. Walters wrote.

Colombia supplies 90 per cent of the cocaine consumed in the U.S.
Declining prices and rising purity could also suggest weakening
demand, but several household and school-based surveys show that the
U.S.'s cocaine consumption has barely budged since 2000, and demand in
Europe has increased.

U.S. officials have insisted repeatedly that Plan Colombia, the
anti-narcotics and counter-insurgency program that has cost American
taxpayers more than $4 billion since 2000, is reducing the quality and
availability to American drug users.

But Mr. Grassley, in an e-mailed statement to The Associated Press,
said the new data are "all the proof that anybody needs" that the
White House drug office "has gotten quite good at spinning the
numbers, but cooking the books doesn't help our efforts to curb
cocaine and heroin production and consumption."