Losing The War On Drugs: An Inevitable Harvest, Part 3

AS LONG AS THERE IS DEMAND, THERE WILL BE SUPPLY

Politicians try to solve the drug problem by destroying the source plants.
Here's why they always fail.

Cocaine, heroin, opium, marijuana: as strange and threatening as these
illegal drugs appear to most people, they are made from quite ordinary
plants. Why not destroy those plants in the field and therefore stop
dangerous drugs from ever being made?

That's a beguiling idea, and a very old one. In the 16th century, the
Marques de Canete, the Spanish viceroy of Peru, was bothered by the extent
to which Indians were chewing coca leaves, a practice that delivers a small
amount of the same drug users take when they snort cocaine today. The
Marques ordered a limit to the amount of coca that could be planted. He
even set up financial incentives to get farmers to substitute food crops
for coca.

It didn't work. Coca was too much in demand, too lucrative. Not even the
power of the viceroy could stifle the power of the market.

Still, the idea that drug problems can be solved by eradicating the source
plants of drugs is so simple and powerful it survived the Marques's failure
and many others like it. Today, international anti-drug efforts are
increasingly targeting source-plants in the field. The elegant cannabis
plant that becomes marijuana and hashish; the squat coca bush, whose leaves
produce cocaine; and the gangly opium poppy, whose sap becomes opium and
heroin: these plants are international criminals, the targets of one of the
greatest law-enforcement efforts in history.

The United States and the United Nations are spending billions of dollars
trying to destroy them.

Third World nations are adding major contributions to the effort from their
slim budgets. The economies of whole regions, even whole countries, are at
stake.

Supporters, especially the U.S. government, insist these efforts can work
with enough resources and co-operation. The UN has even set a target date
for the total eradication of coca, opium poppy and marijuana: 2008.

The many critics of crop eradication, however, point out that this isn't
the first time the UN has set a target date for the end of drug production:
in 1961, the UN said coca and opium poppy would be wiped out worldwide by 1986.

Crop-eradication programs, say the critics, have been tried and failed
repeatedly, and will always fail. Worse, in trying to do the impossible,
the attack on source plants wastes resources that could go to treatment and
development; devastates eco-systems; destabilizes societies; and spreads
the violence and corruption of illegal trafficking from country to country.

The argument between the two sides could be said to be between the "cops"
and the "economists."

The "cops" favour going after source plants in the field. In some cases,
that means sending in workers to manually uproot the plants one by one. More

often, it involves sending helicopters and aircraft to spray the fields
with herbicides, a method capable of destroying hundreds of hectares of
coca, opium poppy or marijuana in an afternoon.

For the U.S., this has been standard policy for decades. As far back as the
early 20th century, the U.S. government talked of destroying source plants.
In the 1970s, it became a major

effort, made notorious when Jimmy Carter's order to spray Mexican marijuana
fields resulted not in the eradication of the marijuana trade, but the
delivery of poisoned marijuana to American consumers.

Today, crop eradication is "the central aspect of U.S. counter-narcotics
thinking," said Barry McCaffrey, the head of the White House's Office of
National Drug Control Policy.

It's not past success that has made the destruction of source plants such a
key American policy. While eradication programs have destroyed huge crops
of drug-producing plants, these losses have always been quickly and easily
replaced elsewhere.

Colombia's "Operation Splendour" is a typical example. In 1994, the
Colombian government of Ernesto Samper, caught in a corruption scandal and
struggling to return to the good graces of the U.S., announced it would
eradicate the country's entire coca and poppy crop within two years. The
Americans kicked in planes, helicopters and herbicide.

Tens of thousands of hectares of drug crops were destroyed in short
order. But just as swiftly, every hectare was replaced, and then some:
Colombia's net production of coca and opium poppy exploded even while
spraying was at its most intense.

The American and Colombian governments responded to this failure with even
more vigorous eradication efforts.

Did they work? That's a matter of perspective. A State Department report
released in March this year declared the latest eradication efforts a
success, noting that in 1999, the spraying destroyed "42,000 hectares of
coca and more than 8,000 hectares of opium poppy." But a 1999 report from
the General Accounting Office, the research arm of the U.S. Congress,
paints a much bleaker picture.

"Despite two years of extensive herbicide spraying," the GAO stated, "there
has not been any net reduction in coca cultivation -- net coca cultivation
actually increased 50 per cent." In fact, Colombia, which grew very little
coca in the early 1990s, is now by far the largest coca cultivator in the
world despite having carried out, over the same time, some of the most
ambitious crop eradication efforts in history.

The critics of the "cops" are the "economists." They say there's an obvious
reason why eradication efforts have failed and why they always will fail:
The law of supply and demand. Wiping out supply leaves demand
unsatisfied. Unsatisfied demand causes rising prices. Rising prices cause
more people to produce supply. Thus, squeezing production in one place only
causes it to expand elsewhere -- the "balloon effect."

Examples abound. When opium poppy growing went down in Pakistan, it surged
in Afghanistan. Poppy went down in Thailand and Mexico, and up in Burma and
Laos. Marijuana was suppressed in Mexico so it shot up in Colombia, and
when it dropped there, it went up in the U.S. Coca plummeted in

Peru and Bolivia and soared in Colombia. Demand, just as the economists
say, creates supply. It's a law as irresistible as gravity.

That law is something that Jaime Ruiz, senior adviser to the Colombian
president, wishes people would consider before stigmatizing Colombia for
producing drugs. "As long as there is demand in the United States and
Europe," he says, "there is going to be supply. If it is not from Colombia,
it is going to be from somewhere else."

Still, some "cops" defend crop eradication by pointing to the linchpin of
the economists' argument: rising prices. After all, they argue, rising
prices at the production level may spur more production, but they also mean
rising prices for the consumer. And higher prices discourage people from
using drugs, which is the whole point of the exercise.

This is wrong on two counts, say the economists. First, the assumption that
price and consumption are joined at the hip is dubious. Cocaine prices in
the U.S. peaked in the late 1970s -- exactly when American consumption of
cocaine reached an all-time high. The years following, when both cocaine
prices and cocaine use steadily fell, also belie the assumption that
cheaper prices mean more use and higher prices mean less.

What's more, rising prices at the production level typically don't result
in higher street-level prices for drugs. As Peter Reuter, a professor at
the University of Maryland, explained in the New York Times, "It costs
cocaine refiners only 30 cents to purchase the coca leaf needed to produce
a gram of cocaine, which sells for about $150 in the United States. Even if
the price of the leaves needed for that gram of the finished product
doubled, the change in retail price would be negligible." And even that
assumes that any increase in production cost would be passed on to the
ultimate consumer, which need not happen, since the traffickers have such a
huge profit margin they can easily absorb any increase in production costs.

A 1994 report commissioned by the U.S. government confirmed the negligible
effect of increasing the cost of production on drug use. The report,
produced by RAND, the American public-policy institution, found that in
reducing cocaine use, treatment of heavy cocaine users is 10 times more
cost-efficient than interdicting smuggled drugs -- and 23 times more
cost-efficient than crop eradication. "These results suggest," the report
concludes, "that if an additional dollar is going to be spent on drug
control, it should be spent on treatment, not on a supply-control program."

Far from heeding this advice, the "cops" instead developed a more
sophisticated mode of crop eradication. Acknowledging that the "balloon
effect" is real, the new approach combines eradication with development
aid, to give farmers positive economic incentives to abandon drugs and grow
legal crops. The UN is vigorously advancing this policy.

Getting farmers to switch from drug crops is a tough sell. There's the
obvious problem of cash: Because drugs are illegal, there is a huge profit
margin in selling them. Even though traffickers pay growers and pickers
just the tiniest fraction of that profit, that fraction is a powerful
enticement in poor nations. In rural Colombia, where bare subsistence is
the economic norm, a farmer can make $500 U.S. a month per hectare of
coca -- legal crops would do well to fetch half that.

An even bigger barrier to getting farmers to switch crops is a lack of
basic infrastructure. Many drug-growing farmers live in areas so isolated
they have no roads linking them to markets, or roads so poor that crops rot
on the way. But drug traffickers offer farmers door-to-door pickup. If
farmers want to sell crops for cash, they often have no choice but to grow
for the traffickers.

On top of all these factors, drug crops are easy to grow and harvest. Coca
in particular is a farmer's dream. It can produce four harvests per year. A
bush can produce for decades. And coca is extraordinarily tough, thriving
even in rocky or acidic soils where nothing else grows. Chop it off at the
trunk and it grows back.

The UN and the U.S. government think all these factors can be overcome and
farmers can be convinced to stick to legal crops. A key part is developing
infrastructure so farmers are able to get legal crops to market. Beyond
that, a U.S. State Department official (who, according to department
policy, may not be named) says, "These folks would be offered the
opportunity for government services in the form ... (of) schools and health
clinics. Those opportunities will not equal the dollar value of growing
coca. There is no question about that.

"The other ways in which we try to create an economic rationale," the State
Department official added, "is on one level to say, 'If you choose not to
do this, we will begin an involuntary eradication program in X period of
time.' "

Supporters of this approach say they have proof it works. Both Peru and
Bolivia began major anti-coca efforts of this type in the second half of
the 1990s. Peru's coca cultivation is down 66 per cent in the last four
years (helped in part by a fungus that attacked Peru's coca bushes).
Bolivia's has fallen 55 per cent in 2 1/2 years. Colombia's coca production
did rise rapidly at the same time, but not as much as these drops, meaning
there was a big net cut in the total amount of coca grown.

Or so the authorities thought at first. Further analysis showed that
Colombian cocaine productivity was 2.5 times higher than previously
believed. "We were underestimating the number of harvests per year," says
the State Department spokesman. "We were underestimating the leaf yield,
and we were underestimating the efficiency of processing." No one knows for
how long these errors were made, so it's impossible to say for how long the
U.S. has been underestimating South American cocaine production.

Once the 1998 and 1999 figures for Colombia were adjusted accordingly, the
major drop in cocaine production vanished. Instead, the decrease was only
marginal. And Colombian traffickers have now substantially reduced their
costs because they no longer have to ship most of their coca from Peru and
Bolivia to Colombia.

Undeterred, the U.S. government argues that Peru and Bolivia still prove
crop replacement works, and so it will fund, at a cost of more than $1
billion U.S., an attack by the Colombian army on rebel-held territories in
the south of the country. Once these areas are under control, the U.S.
believes, crop replacement programs can eliminate coca and opium poppy
growing and cause a major net reduction in cocaine and heroin. Careful
monitoring and swift reaction will then stop drug production from slipping
back over the border into Peru and Bolivia, or from starting up in Ecuador,
Venezuela or Brazil.

Many are deeply skeptical. Ricardo Vargas, a Colombian sociologist who
studies the drug trade, insists that "even if the government succeeds in
scrapping (traffickers') supply, they'll just set up somewhere else. It's
like a law."

In fact, there are signs that gains in Peru and Bolivia are already being
lost. Prices for coca are steadily rising, tempting farmers to return to
the business. Traffickers have started refining cocaine in Peru itself,
and opium poppy, which had been little in evidence in the country, is
expanding. Barry McCaffrey, the American drug czar, admitted to Congress
last fall that "in Peru, the drug-control situation is deteriorating."

That reality aside, even if the U.S., the UN and local governments managed
the Herculean task of pushing coca production down -- and keeping it down
- -- across South America, there's little to keep it from popping up any
place else in the world -- just as opium poppy has done over the years. One
vehicle for such a shift could be insurgent movements, such as Colombia's
FARC, which have become reliant on drug trafficking to finance their
rebellions since the end of the Cold War dried up funding from
superpowers. The move from shipping drugs to producing drugs wouldn't be
difficult for some. Albanian gangs, in fact, have recently attempted to
grow coca in the Albanian countryside.

The State Department official dismissed these possibilities. The Andean
region, he said, "is essentially the area of the world in which coca
appears to grow."

That's true today, but it was not always. In the late-19th century, coca
was grown commercially in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, Iwo Jima
and Nigeria. At the beginning of the 20th century, Indonesia exported more
coca leaf than Peru. What's to prevent drug traffickers from starting coca
production in a large, unstable, corrupt country such as Nigeria or
Indonesia?

The State Department official responds: "There's no reason for anyone else
to grow it because they'd have to compete with these very vicious
trafficking organizations to introduce it to the market." But if
coca production were suppressed in South America, it would be those "very
vicious trafficking organizations" that would themselves be growing it
elsewhere. Call it the globalization of the "balloon effect."

Leaving aside the entire question of whether drug-crop eradication programs
can ever work, there are still reasons to doubt the wisdom of fighting
drugs this way. For one, there is the "opportunity cost," to use
economists' jargon, that these programs entail. What could have been done
with the many billions of dollars these programs cost? The RAND study,
which found treatment to be vastly more effective at reducing drug use,
suggests the opportunity costs of crop suppression are enormous.

For Third-World nations, whose meagre budgets cannot absorb failed schemes,
the costs are higher still. The dismal failure of "Operation Splendour," to
take one example, cost Colombia and the U.S. $300 million U.S.

Operation Splendour, and similar programs that followed, also inflicted
another cost on Colombia, one quite common when crop eradication schemes
are tried. Tens of thousands of coca farmers who saw their livelihoods
vanish in a spray of herbicide felt betrayed by their government. At times,
protests grew to resemble open revolt.

Similar protests in Bolivia resulted in clashes with the army and dozens of
deaths.

This unrest among rural farmers in Colombia naturally fuelled the civil
war. For decades, the main guerrilla faction in Colombia, FARC, had never
had more than 6,000 fighters, but from 1990 to 1995, it grew to 8,000. In
the five years since then, FARC's membership has doubled.

Guerrillas aren't the only blight on the Colombian countryside. Huge
patches of clear-cut jungle have spread across Colombia's south. These
giant, open sores are left behind after planes spray coca fields, forcing
farmers to go elsewhere and cut more holes in the jungle. According to the
U.S. government, almost two million acres have been cleared for the coca
trade over the past 15 years, less than one-third of which is now in use.

Mr. Ruiz, the senior adviser to Colombia's president, notes that the land
available in the Andes region is so vast that "you spray fields and you
don't do anything. They just move somewhere else because they have the
territory. So they just move and move and move."

Colombia's years of spraying eventually pushed the coca industry into the
southeast of the country, the sparsely populated Amazon basin. Tens of
thousands of farmers and harvesters arrived suddenly and began hacking at
the jungle in what Mr. Ruiz calls "the Coca Rush."

Eco-systems are also afflicted on a more local level. Although the U.S. is
adamant that the herbicides used in spraying are environmentally safe,
their long-term effects are open to some doubt. For farmers who, not
uncommonly, get caught in the spray, this is an unsettling possibility,
however remote.

Chemicals that certainly are unsafe, however, are those used to process
coca leaf into cocaine. To dodge the authorities, traffickers use small,
mobile laboratories that stay at one place in the jungle for a week or two,
then move on. Since it takes about 250 litres of gasoline (or kerosene or
acetone) and 50 kilograms of cement to process just one kilo of cocaine,
piles of noxious waste are left scattered all over the processing regions.

A new anti-drug strategy is further cause for alarm. The fungus that
attacked Peruvian coca is being worked into a bio-herbicide to be dumped on
coca in other countries. The U.S. is pushing Colombia to apply this
"mycoherbicide." The State Department bills it as a "more environmentally
friendly" approach, but there's inherent danger in introducing an alien
species to new ecosystems, particularly when it would have to be injected
in large quantities across great distances.

If at least some of the perils of crop eradication are speculative, the
benefits are entirely so. More than 400 years after the Marques de Canete
tried and failed to stop coca in the fields, there is still little reason
to think that these policies can substantially reduce drug use and the
harms associated with it.

The Marques de Canete may have unwittingly demonstrated a limit of
governmental power -- just as another ruler with an oddly similar name,
King Canute, did intentionally when he ordered the tides to stop. But
Canute's lesson at least has been learned. Canete's remains unheeded.

Dan Gardner is a Citizen editorial writer

Losing the War on Drugs

Is the war on drugs causing more harm than drug abuse itself? The Citizen's
Dan Gardner spent five months researching this question, travelling to
Colombia, Mexico and the United States, where efforts to end the
international trade in illicit drugs have led to unexpected, often
unwelcome, consequences.