OPIUM POPPY SPREADING FROM COLOMBIA TO PERU

Traffickers Are Moving Outside Drug War Areas

WASHINGTON -- The opium poppy, the raw ingredient for heroin, has now been
found in Peru, where it has spread from Colombia, underscoring the
difficulty of containing the boundaries of the drug war.

"We're finding it in high altitudes in Peru," said Rand Beers, assistant
secretary of state for international law enforcement and narcotics affairs.

Drug traffickers introduced the poppy to Colombia a decade ago, seeking to
diversify from cocaine to heroin.

Drug enforcement experts now say Colombia is the source of as much as 75
percent of the heroin found along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.

Beers said he didn't have solid figures on how much opium poppy has been
discovered in Peru, but traffickers there also seem to want to broaden
their sources of income.

"The traffickers understand that more is better than less and that
different products are better than a single product," Beers said.

Poppy is usually grown at higher altitudes. Farmers slit the poppy plant to
extract a milky latex gum that is later processed into opium and heroin.
Traditionally, poppy is grown in Central Asia and the Golden Triangle
region of Southeast Asia.

Authorities are noticing "rapid increases in cultivation of opium poppy" in
Peru as traffickers look for "geographic regions that are outside of the
current target areas," according to a Web site of the U.S. Agency for
International Development.

Carlos Alzamora, Peru's ambassador to the United States, recently wrote
that he is worried U.S.-financed aerial fumigation of coca and poppy
plantations in Colombia will raise prices for the raw materials for
narcotics, "motivating (Peruvian) peasants to return to coca cultivation."