'WE HAVE THE WORST OF BOTH WORLDS'

Colombia Suffers 32,000 Casualties A Year Fighting A War Created By The
West's Appetite For Drugs

LONDON - "It is like that," says His Excellency Victor Ricardo, the
Colombian ambassador to England. He gestures with an elegantly
flannelled arm at a plant on top of the television in my office. "Only
larger."

I gaze at the plant, which looks particularly droopy and unthreatening,
and try to imagine the amazing properties of its Latin American
lookalike.

The ambassador has done us the honour of dropping in for tea, and we are
of course discussing the coca plant, the key ingredient of a
$350-billion global industry. They pick it, mash it, boil it and then
somehow turn it into a white powder which disappears at a prodigious
rate up the noses of the western world.

Burst into the lavatories of one of those trendy clubs in London,
England, I am told, and you will find any number of New Labour PR types
inhaling Colombia's No. 1 export; and when they found poor Paula Yates
earlier this week, the chances are, alas, that there was a little piece
of Colombia somewhere in the room.

Yes, says the ambassador, a "high percentage" of the cocaine in Britain
probably originated in his country. The Americans say that 90 per cent
of their cocaine consumption -- and much of their heroin -- comes from
Colombia, and once again they are going ape. In a plan that has been
likened to the Vietnam War, U.S. President Bill Clinton has decided to
stamp out the source of so much misery by eradicating the crop itself.
At a cost of $1.3 billion to the American taxpayer, he is sending 60
Black Hawk helicopter gunships, 300 troops, and innumerable spies and
Drug Enforcement Agency officials to this proud and independent country.

Yet more American money -- about $900 million -- is to be poured into
the fight against the left-wing guerrillas who control the coca
production.

Fifteen more spray planes will be supplied by Uncle Sam to squirt the
countryside with a Monsanto-made defoliant called Glyphosate -- a
particularly nasty substance that destroys all vegetation, be it coca,
coffee or bananas.

Between 1992 and 1998, the Americans funded the destruction of 140,000
hectares of crops -- and guess what? Production of coca has tripled.

"It is stupid," says Mr. Ricardo, a jovial man of not much more than 40,
who has been ambassador to Argentina, high commissioner for Peace, and
governor of the province of Cundinamarca.

This seems oddly frank from a man whose government has been quite
content to mainline American money. But then I guess he would not have
come to tea if he was entirely happy with U.S. policy. His first
objection is that the defoliant causes side-effects -- he rubs imaginary
blisters on his arm. Calves are born hairless. Chickens die after eating
sprayed areas.

"No matter how much you spray, the production doubles in five years.
There are 300,000 campesinos involved, and when they see that their
fields are being sprayed they move into the forest, and they destroy the
forest."

The big cartels -- Cali, Medellin -- may be on the wane, but the war is
bloodier than ever: between left-wing guerrillas who protect the
drug-growing peasants, and right-wing paramilitaries who retaliate with
Arkanesque ferocity and who are the proxies and, in a sense, the
hirelings of America.

"We have the worst of both worlds," says Mr. Ricardo. "We have 32,000
dead per year in the fight against drugs, and we will keep seeing more
deaths if there is not a new approach. We accept that Colombia has a
problem with the production and trade in illicit drugs, but we demand
that the entire picture is analyzed. There is a demand, and that demand
is not in Colombia. We haven't seen any progress in the debate on
demand."

Of course, the ambassador would like help -- generous help -- in
steering the poor of Colombia away from coca production. He deplores the
$1.2 billion wasted by his own government in fighting the drug trade
when, so he claims, this money could be given over to helping the
campesinos. He speaks of flowers or palm oil or exotic fruit or even
oxygen quotas, as possible cash-generating alternatives to coca.

But when he talks about the "problem of demand," he can only mean one
thing: that the West is being dishonest and hypocritical in blitzing the
jungle and plantations of Colombia with a latter-day Agent Orange.
Because the problem lies not in this modest shrublet, but in the moral
weaklings of the West who take drugs, and the muddle of western
governments who wage a "war on drugs" rather than on the akrasia of
their own citizens.

Coca is by far the most lucrative crop produced by Colombia, but the
Colombians can't tax it, and the Colombian state derives no benefit from
its production. We are led irresistibly to the case for legalization.

"That is not our problem," says Mr. Ricardo. "We have to take a lot of
care because the position we take could be seen as benefiting the people
in the drugs business.

"But speaking personally," he says, "what is banned is clearly more
valuable, and without prohibition there wouldn't be a business. We used
to have a lot of marijuana in Colombia, and once they legalized
consumption in 11 states of the U.S., the problem was gone."

If the United States, and the West generally, legalized cocaine and
other coca-derived drugs, would that end the war in his country?

"Politically, no; but it would greatly diminish the violence."

Of course, we have our drug-related tragedies in the West. But this
man's country is losing 32,000 a year to a drug-related conflict. Who
suffers more?

He well may be wrong about liberalization: however strong one's love of
individual liberty, there is something comforting about a ban on what is
so obviously destructive.

And yet one has a strong feeling that this is a case that deserves to be
heard, and that it is up to us western hypocrites to respond.

Has he taken cocaine himself, I ask. "I've never had any chance," he
beams. "I've seen more coke outside Colombia than inside."