PROFIT POTENTIAL IS STRONG ENEMY IN WAR ON DRUGS

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Is the U.S. government winning its 30-year-old war
on drugs?

Consider the recently ended Operation Libertador, which showcased
cooperation between dozens of countries and yielded the capture of an
alleged drug kingpin as well as the seizure of tons of marijuana and
cocaine amid a flurry of public relations releases.

It was "a major takedown," said Michael Vigil, head of the Drug Enforcement
Administration's Caribbean operation.

Now consider these sobering words from a former Jamaican commissioner of
police, retired army Col. Trevor McMillan, who has watched the drug war
breed such corruption in his country that all Cabinet ministers were forced
into a public denial this fall that they are in any way involved.

"What the drug war has done is to drive the price of drugs up, so the more
the price of drugs goes up, the more money there is to corrupt people,"
says McMillan. "Until we remove the profit out of trafficking, nothing will
change."

Regional Cooperation

This war may slog on for another half century or more, according to the
veterans who have fought it in the trenches. Among them is Vigil, who has
spent 27 years in the DEA, including a couple of years in Colombia at the
height of the fight to bring down the Cali cartel.

He tells a reporter: "We will be able to win this scourge -- [but] it may
not be in your lifetime or mine."

Still, he touts the regional cooperation strategy that he helped develop.
It is a fight largely financed and led by the United States through
multinational operations such as Libertador, which involved 36 Latin
American and Caribbean countries and territories.

Police reported arresting 2,876 people and seizing 20 tons of cocaine, 29
tons of marijuana and 82,170 ecstasy tablets during the Oct. 27-Nov. 19
operation. They said they also dismantled 94 drug factories and seized 100
tons of chemicals for drug-making.

Among those arrested was Martires Paulino Castro, whose apprehension in the
Dominican Republic ended a two-year investigation in four countries. Agents
say Paulino's 10-year-old network stretched from Dutch St. Maarten to New
York and was capable of moving 4,400 pounds of Colombian cocaine a month to
the United States.

Paulino was arrested by American and Dominican authorities and will be
tried in his native Dominican Republic on drug trafficking charges.

Growing Skepticism

Drug kingpins such as Paulino can be caught, and drug trafficking
disrupted, only "by these [Caribbean] countries working with one another,"
Vigil said.

Still, there is growing skepticism in the region about the drug war, which
rankles local nationalists by seeming to cede some sovereignty to U.S.
authorities while not appearing to seriously dent the drug trade.

Three decades after the war began, smuggling is at an all-time high, along
with a rising tide of violent crime and corruption. Many critics say that's
because of the war's heavy emphasis on interdiction and eradication rather
than on efforts to reduce drug use.

Those on the war's front lines contend the situation would be immeasurably
worse if nothing was done.

"We now have guns, ammunition, gang warfare that we didn't have before,"
says Rear Adm. Richard Kelshall, one of Trinidad's top drug fighters.

"See, if we were to stop at all, then this [violence] would just escalate .
. . ," he says. "We don't know what the top limit would be. So we have to
be out there, we have to be vigilant, we have to stop the drugs coming in,
even if we're not actually stopping the full load."

In 1999, more than two-thirds of the estimated 506 tons of cocaine produced
in South America was shipped through the Caribbean -- the first time
Caribbean smuggling outstripped Mexico's, the United Nations'
Barbados-based drug monitoring program says.

Corruption Has Increased

Critics in the United States and Caribbean argue that criminal
organizations flourish because of the drug war, not in spite of it. The
war's focus on enforcement only jacks up prices, which in turn foster vast
smuggling networks that are well-financed, armed and organized.

"Corruption around drugs has increased significantly," McMillan, the former
Jamaican police official, said after corruption became a public topic in
his country.

Rumors that government ministers were caught on tape discussing cocaine
smuggling have swirled around Jamaica since Prime Minister P.J. Patterson
in October ordered an investigation into allegations that his telephone was
illegally bugged along with those of Cabinet ministers and drug gang
leaders with political ties.

Within days of Patterson's disclosure, the police commissioner said
high-ranking police officers were being investigated for allegedly aiding
Colombian smugglers.

Jamaica has one of the worst murder rates in the world -- 849 people in
1999 out of population of 2.6 million -- a reality many blame on drug
gangs. Drug gangs are also blamed for the high murder rate in Puerto Rico.

With shifts in world trade costing the region tens of thousands of jobs and
shrinking export profits, the Caribbean's small island states have become
more vulnerable than ever to drug lords whose fortunes dwarf those of its
governments and poorly paid law enforcers.

Drug scandals brought down the government of St. Kitts and Nevis in 1994.
Britain dissolved the government of its Turks and Caicos Islands territory
in 1986 after then-Chief Minister Norman Saunders was convicted and jailed
in Miami on drug-trafficking charges.

Saunders was reelected in 1995.

A U.N. report released in late November blames the surge in trafficking on
"weak states, economic structures dependent on sectors such as tourism or
financial services that are vulnerable to money laundering, and economic
and human networks connecting the region to drug-consuming countries."

The solution, McMillan and others say, is decriminalizing or legalizing
drugs, then using the money now spent on the drug war to pay for education
and addiction recovery programs that would reduce demand for drugs.