TOXIC WAR

The latest twist in the US government's wrongheaded effort to wage its war
on US drug abuse in Colombia - at the expense of detox and rehab units here
- - is a plan to sic a deadly fungus on the coca plants and poppies that are
the raw material for cocaine and heroin. This would be on top of the $1.3
billion for antidrug helicopters and training that Congress just agreed to
provide to Colombia.

The basic flaw in this strategy is that, regardless of what is done on
hillsides in South America, drugs will flow into the United States from
some corner of the globe as long as there is a strong market for them here.
A more promising approach would focus on the prevention and treatment of
drug addiction in this country. The $1.3 billion that Washington is
shipping south, which is almost twice the annual budget of the
research-oriented National Institute of Drug Abuse, would cover a year's
treatment and rehabilitation costs for 1.7 million substance abusers.

Environmentalists are so concerned about the impact that the coca fungus,
Fusarium oxysporum, might have on an area's ecosystem that they blocked
testing of a similar fungus on marijuana fields in Florida. Colombia has
its own doubts. Its environmental minister, Juan Mayr, has insisted that
tests of the fungus would have to be conducted outside his country, so
worried is he about the agent's ''grave risks to the environment and human
health.''

In a New York Times report on this plan last week, scientists also raised
questions about the effectiveness of the herbicide strategy. They point to
the difficulty of getting a fungus like this to have a major impact on a
crop and to the likelihood that the coca growers would counter with a
fungicide or switch to a coca variety that is fungus resistant. Inevitably,
Fusarium oxysporum will invite comparison with the far more toxic Agent
Orange herbicides used in Vietnam by US leaders pursuing another
scorched-earth solution.

The abuse of drugs, from alcohol to Ecstasy to heroin, is a terrible
problem in this country. But it is a problem that families, schools,
churches, and treatment programs are much more capable of addressing than
Black Hawk and Huey helicopters - or fungi.