COLOMBIA'S DRUG PROBLEM: US

I won't be surprised if by the time you read this, Andres Pastrana has
explained away much of what he told the New York Times on Tuesday. After
all, the Colombian president was just hours away from welcoming the
American president, who was on his way with $1.3 billion in Colombian
aid--largely anti-drug aid--in his pocket.

But the gist of what Pastrana said seems beyond dispute: There's not much
use putting economic and military pressure on drug-producing countries such
as his unless the drug-using countries such as the United States take care
of their problem.

"Colombia can put a stop to drugs here at some point," Pastrana told the
Times' Clifford Krauss in Cartagena, "but if the demand continues, somebody
else somewhere else in the world is going to produce them." He said he'd
already heard reports of possible plantings in Africa.

"What we are talking about is the most lucrative business in the
world--unless the recent spike in oil prices has made it the
second-most-lucrative business in the world."

One reason it is so lucrative, of course, is that rich Europeans and
especially Americans have money to spend on it. Another is that our
attempts to disrupt the market here--our ill-named war on drugs--make
heroin and cocaine artificially scarce, thus keeping up the prices.

Pastrana, whether by inadvertence, apolitical candor or devious design,
blurted out the truth: The only sure way America can solve its drug problem
is by reducing demand. The only irreplaceable player in the drug-racket
chain--from peasant producer and armed exporter to middleman, money
launderer, distributor, street pusher and user--is the last one. Take away
the user and the whole thing collapses.

How to do that is, of course, the question. The answers are more likely to
include some combination of punishment for casual users and treatment for
addicts than the things we've been focusing on in recent years: mandatory
sentences and pressure on countries where the stuff is produced.

The first has filled our prisons to overflowing with nonviolent offenders,
and the second has produced more political instability than measurable
benefits.

Indeed, the aid package Clinton delivered to Colombia this week is, at
least in part, an attempt to immunize the Colombian government against
massively armed drug traffickers who have the money to subvert government
officials and the muscle to intimidate those they can't buy.

Much of the aid package is to be used to strengthen the Colombian
military's drug eradication efforts. But isn't it likely that before long
more and more of the money will be used to strengthen the military against
the drug gangsters and less and less of it to eradicate drugs? After all,
enlisting other governments in a military assault against our problem tends
to destabilize those governments, giving them a claim on more American aid
to prevent or reverse the destabilization.

I don't know how firmly Pastrana will stick to his candor; after all he is
trying to sell his $7.5 billion Plan Columbia (of which the current U.S.
aid package is a part) as his home-grown solution to drug trafficking,
armed thuggery and economic hard times.

But we in the United States ought to understand the truth of what he said
the other day. If we keep producing millions of drug users and addicts,
someone--whether in Latin America, the Golden Triangle or domestic
laboratories--will be there to supply them.

If we can find a way to reduce that demand--through sanction, education and
treatment--we won't need to pressure foreign governments into restricting
supply.

And don't tell me it can't be done. We've done it with cigarettes. We've
even managed it with teen pregnancy. Shouldn't we at least try it with drugs?