WAR AGAINST COLOMBIA COCAINE SAID TO BE WEAKENING HEROIN EFFORT

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA -- The United States' $1.3 billion war on Colombian cocaine
has had an unexpected consequence: It has forced the scaling back of efforts
to end the 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 some U.S. legislators concerned about
increased heroin production.

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 (DEA).

At a hearing in Washington last week, 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 still produces nearly 100 times as much cocaine as heroin. Cocaine
produced there 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.

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, the Colombian author of a book
on the country's drug policy. "No matter how many planes come, more plants
will always be planted."